Full text of "The New Cambridge Modern History"

See other formats

THE NEW
CAMBRIDGE
MODERN HISTORY

THE

RENAISSANCE,

1493-1520

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE NEW

CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY

ADVISORY COMMITTEE
G.N.CLARK J. R. M.BUTLER J.P.T.BURY
THE LATE E. A. BENIANS

VOLUME I

THE RENAISSANCE

1493-1520

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE NEW

CAMBRIDGE MODERN
HISTORY

VOLUME I

THE RENAISSANCE

1493-1520

PLANNED BY

G. R. POTTER

EDITED WITH A NEW PREFACE BY

DENYS HAY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE

LONDON • NEW YORK • MELBOURNE

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Published by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP
Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA
296 Beaconsfield Parade, Middle Park, Melbourne 3206, Australia

Hard covers ISBN: 0 521 04541 X
Paperback ISBN: 0 521 09974 9

First edition 1957

Reprinted with minor corrections 1961
Reprinted 1964 1967 1971
First paperback edition 1975

Printed in Great Britain
at the

University Printing House, Cambridge
(Euan Phillips, University Printer)

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition page vii

By Denys Hay, Professor of Medieval History in the
University of Edinburgh

General Introduction: History and the Modern Historian xiii
By Sir George Clark, sometime Regius Professor of
Modern History in the University of Cambridge

i Introduction l

By Denys Hay

ii The face of Europe on the eve of the great discoveries 20

By H. C. Darby, Professor of Geography in the University
of Cambridge

hi Fifteenth-century civilisation and the Renaissance 50

By Hans Baron, sometime distinguished Research Fellow,
Newberry Library, Chicago

iv The Papacy and the Catholic Church 76

By the late R. Aubenas, formerly Professor in the Faculte
de Droit d'Aix of the University of Aix-Marseille

v Learning and education in Western Europe from 1470 to

1520 95

By the late R. Weiss, formerly Professor of Italian at
University College, London

vi The arts in Western Europe

1. Italy, by the late R. Wittkower, formerly Professor of

the History of Art, Columbia University, New York 127

2. Northern Europe, by L. D. Ettlinger, Chairman of

Department of Art and History of Art, University of
California, Berkeley 153

3. Spain by Enriqueta Frankfort, sometime Curator

of the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute,
University of London 165

4. Vernacular literature in Western Europe, by H. W.
Lawton, Emeritus Professor of French in the University

of Sheffield 169

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CONTENTS

vii The Empire under Maximilian I page 194

By the late R. G. D. Laffan, formerly Fellow of Queens'
College, Cambridge

viii The Burgundian Netherlands, 1477-1521 224

By C. A. J. Armstrong, Fellow of Hertford College and
Lecturer in Modern History in the University of Oxford

ix International relations in the West : diplomacy and war 259

By J. R. Hale, Professor of Italian at University College,
London

x France under Charles VIII and Louis XII 292

By the late R. Doucet, formerly Professor in the Faculte
de Lett res of the University of Strasbourg

xi The Hispanic kingdoms and the Catholic kings 316

By J. M. Batista i Roca, Lecturer in Spanish in the
University of Cambridge

xii The invasions of Italy 343

By the late Cecilia M. Ady, formerly Honorary Fellow of
St Hugh's College, Oxford

xiii Eastern Europe 368

By C. A. Macartney, sometime Fellow of All Souls

College, Oxford

xiv The Ottoman empire ( 1 48 1 - 1 5 20)

By the late V. J. Parry, formerly Reader in the History of 395
the Near and Middle East in the School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London

xv The New World

1. Portuguese expansion, by H. V. Livermore, Professor

of Hispanic and Italian Studies, University of British
Columbia 420

2. Spaniards in the New World, by J. H. Parry, Gardner

Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard 430

University

xvi Expansion as a concern of all Europe 445

By E. E. Rich, sometime Master of St Catharine's College
and Professor of Imperial History in the University of
Cambridge

Index 470

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

T his book was planned and written well over twenty years ago. The
Introduction, to which this is an addendum, was written, somewhat
hurriedly, in 1956. 1 In what ways would it have been different if
written in 1975? The book itself would, of course have been different.
Professor Potter’s team of authors was the team then at his disposal, and
there were doubtless writers he would have liked to enlist had he been able 2 .
But I suspect that the very chronological limits of the volume and its place
in related series imposed severe limitations on available choices. As Sir
George Clark writes below (p. xxxiv), Lord Acton had produced the
masterly design of the Cambridge Modern History ; the Medieval History
came out of the same Press (1911-36) and then there was a reversion to
the beginning, as one might say, with the Ancient History (1923-39), quite
apart from other works on the British Empire and other areas. Hence a
fresh Cambridge Modern History had to be tailored to fit existing models.
Its first two volumes had surely to be called ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Refor-
mation’ respectively.

Of all the changes that have overtaken historical scholarship in recent
times, it may be suspected that a desire to jettison the old hard-and-fast
division between ‘medieval’ and ‘modem’ has pride of place. This yearn-
ing is frequently satisfied by the device of using the word Renaissance to
mean primarily not a cultural crisis spread over a period, but a period
itself. In the U.S.A. indeed Renaissance conveniently covers the cen-
turies between Petrarch and Vico; and in this volume the ‘Renaissance’
of the title covers a survey of the main developments in most aspects of
European History within an era over-precisely described in the title as
running from 1493 to 1520. Such a use of the word to denote an epoch,
however long or short, obliterates the ideological sense of the word.
Everything that happens within the time span can be labelled ‘Renais-
sance’, just as anything that happened in Victorian Britain can be labelled
‘Victorian’. This is quite a reasonable way out of the difficulty, provided
one does not confuse the two interpretations of the word. As explained
below (p. 2) the harbingers of what a later age would regard as the
physical sciences were in no way humanist in their interests. In the new
school curriculum, the major innovation of the Renaissance (along with

1 When Professor Potter was appointed cultural attach^ in Germany the present writer
undertook to provide an introduction and see the volume through the Press.

* Professor Potter writes: ‘The planning of this volume was influenced by wise editorial
“instructions” from Sir George Clark and by the inability of two distinguished authors to
write chapters originally allocated to them. Renaissance scholarship in 1950 when the first
invitations were sent out was in an unusually transitional state.’

vii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

PREFACE

parallel developments in the fine arts), there was naturally a small place
allowed to the gentlemanly subject of mathematics. But the time-table
was overwhelmingly devoted to Latin. Latin was no longer treated as
necessary because one needed it to read the Scriptures and the Missal,
but because it was the language of Cicero and Vergil, of truth and beauty
in their own right. By means of Latin one might attain the supreme
ability — the ability to communicate. Of course such communication was
often not in Latin, although a surprising amount of it was. But even when
people wrote or spoke in Italian, French or the other vernaculars, those
of them who were literate, who were important, had all been to the same
sort of grammar school; they all knew the basic Latin classics and the
Bible. Even those who had no interest whatever in learning, but only an
appropriate place in society, had had the ablative absolute instilled into
them, often at a heavy price: what Ascham was later to call ‘beating
nature’.

The use of the word ‘Renaissance’ as a period, then, should encourage
us to transcend, as contemporaries perforce had to, those frontiers of
convenience adopted by historians as temporal divisions. It has been by
neglecting such artificial boundaries that much new light has been thrown,
for example, on Thomas More and Luther. It is clear from Professor
Elton’s preface to the paperback edition of the second volume of the
N.C.M.H. the degree to which current Reformation research has begun
to emphasize the medieval antecedents and influences in much sixteenth-
century religious thought.

One change which has certainly affected Renaissance studies (as also
and a fortiori classical and medieval studies) has been the dramatic decline
in the amount of Latin taught in the schools of at any rate the English-
speaking world. This is admittedly a process which began a long while
back, but until the Second World War most boys or girls proceeding to
read any kind of Arts at the university would have been given some kind
of training in Latin. In the last quarter of a century the scene has been
dramatically transformed in Britain and the Commonwealth ; in the coun-
tries of North America the decline has been less pronounced, but only
because Latin had never been so generally taught in the secondary schools.
The results of this change are manifold. One is the difficulty many stu-
dents experience in reading the older canonical works which, although
written in their own language, have a fair amount of quotation and
allusion in ‘the obscurity of a learned language’. Text-books and even
monographs must now provide translations or at any rate ample clues
for the interpretation of such material. This may or may not be all loss:
it is occasionally no bad thing for a scholar to make up his mind exactly
what his text means. Further, there has been a quite remarkable increase
in the quantity and quality of Renaissance texts available in translation.
Writers like More and Erasmus were, of course, translated more or less

viii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

PREFACE

in their own day, so far as their more popular books were concerned.
But ‘Tudor translations’ are notoriously unreliable, and in any event
involve the comprehension of archaic or obsolete words and phrases.
Later translations, especially those produced in the nineteenth century,
were all too frequently hack works, debased ‘ modernisations ’ of earlier
and erratic versions, devoid of literary merit and innocent of any pretence
at scholarship. (A good example of this can be found in the English
versions of Platina’s Lives of the Popes.) But in the last couple of decades
a quite new standard has been attained. Two enterprises are so ambitious
and impressive that they must be instanced. 1 In 1963 there appeared the
second volume (but the first to be published) of the Yale edition of the
complete works of Thomas More : The History of King Richard III. More
had himself produced an English version of this which was printed on
facing pages by the Yale editor, R. S. Sylvester. The next volume to
appear (vol. 4, 1965) was Utopia , with a scrupulously revised text and
translation by Edward Surtz S.J., and a long and authoritative intro-
duction by J. H. Hexter. The series continues. Meanwhile an even more
staggering programme has been initiated in Toronto, a complete English
version of the works of Erasmus. Of this the first volume to appear con-
tains his early letters (nos. 1-141 in P. S. Allen’s enumeration): this sec-
tion of the Correspondence, translated by R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S.
Thomson, is edited by Wallace K. Ferguson and was published in 1974.
The editorial board cautiously avoids stating how many volumes the
scheme will ultimately entail.

Many other lesser examples can be found in all modern languages of
texts printed with translations, or of translations treated with the care
and precision which enable the reader to rely on them with confidence
and with a learned commentary which goes much of the way to dispense
the scholar from recourse to the original. It would naturally be absurd to
imply that the preparation of critical editions of Renaissance texts without
translation has stopped. Erasmus is again a case in point. An inter-
national team has embarked on a new and revised recension of the
Leyden Opera omnia of 1703-6. The first instalment of this appeared at
Amsterdam in 1969.

Another development, not unique to Renaissance studies, but most
prominent in that area, is the publication of collections of essays by
different authors, organised round a theme. Three such works have
proved influential: Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob (i960), Florentine
Studies, ed. N. Rubinstein (1969), and Renaissance Venice — Essays, ed.
John Hale (1973). The emphasis on Florence and Venice reflected in the
titles of these books not unfairly represents the direction of most Italian

1 It is fair to say that in medieval history the trail was blazed long ago with ‘Les classiques
de Phistoire de France au moyen age’ and the Columbia ‘Records of Civilization’. The
‘Nelson’s Medieval Texts’, now continued as the ‘Oxford Medieval Texts’, began in 1949.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

PREFACE

research, at least by British and American scholars; other centres have
been relatively neglected, despite (for example) the exciting prospects
suggested by the relevant volumes of the ‘Treccani degli Alfieri’ Storia di
Milano. Rome in the early Renaissance awaits its historian, although
there are some excellent works now available in the fields of urbanistica
and the fine arts: one may instance T. Magnuson’s Studies in Roman
Quattrocento Architecture (1958) and L. D. Ettlinger’s The Sistine Chapel
before Michelangelo (1965). This concentration of research, especially in
English, on Florence and Venice, reflects traditional sentiment of a non-
scholarly kind and also library facilities well above the Italian average.
And of course both towns have remarkable archives, often nowadays
exploited by scholars anxious to bridge the gap between sociology and
history. The shadow of the computer lies over the Renaissance.

Down to the i52o’s, when this volume has its formal terminus, the new
humanities and the new arts were more actively pursued in Italy than
elsewhere. As yet only Erasmus, Bude and More had attained the stature
of the greater Italian scholars and men of letters, and they have been
accorded due recognition in recent years. Other questions remain without
any answers, other authors with only partial treatment. Far too little
attention has been paid as yet to northern cultural influences in Italy
during the quattrocento, and much more light could be thrown on the
Italian contributions to trans-Alpine ‘ prehumanism Of most countries
it is true that our knowledge is still very much what it was a quarter of a
century ago. France, however, has been very much better served. The
energy of Franco Simone has resulted in a number of important books,
and notably his II Rinascimento Francese (1961); more recently we have
been presented by Eugene F. Rice with his fundamental edition of the
Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefevre d'EtapIes and Related Texts (1972):
‘ ... the efforts of Lefevre and his circle to reform instruction in the faculty
of arts during the last decade of the fifteenth century and the first decade
of the sixteenth mark the critical stage in the adaptation of the cultural
program of Italian humanism to the educational tradition of the Univer-
sity of Paris’. Lefevre was a clear case of the old or medieval mingling
with new ideas, and the same interesting amalgam can be seen in the
German Abbot Johannes Trithemius, to whom Klaus Arnold has devoted
a welcome study (1971). And, if much awaits investigation, specialists in
the period now at last have their own Bibliographic internationale de
1 'humanisme et de la Renaissance, an annual which first came out at
Geneva in 1966 with a survey of works published in 1965.

The present volume of the N.C.M.H. is entitled The Renaissance and
in the preceding paragraphs some account has been taken of changing
influences on and new contributions to the study of Renaissance civilisa-
tion. Many more remarks might have been made under this head. There
is, for example, a new and stimulating interest in rhetoric, and an attempt

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

PREFACE

to see how the assumptions deriving from classical and medieval rhetorical
theory have to be mastered if we are properly to understand what
humanists were trying to say. There is a new and lively activity to be
seen in the history and achievements of humanist historians. For the
period covered in the following pages original reflections are expressed by
Felix Gilbert in his study of Machiavelli and Guicciardini (1965), the two
historians who, from Ranke onwards, have dominated the interpretation
of the Italian and European background of this epoch. Some valuable
work has also been devoted to the rich interaction, just beginning at this
time, between law and history; see, for instance, Donald K. Kelley’s
Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (1970), and compare too
the perceptive remark below at p. xx.

It would be beyond the present writer’s competence and the space
allotted to these brief additional remarks to indicate even the most im-
portant works in all the subjects covered in the following chapters which
have materially added to our knowledge since this book first came out.
The attempt would in any case produce a list even more idiosyncratic
than the handful of titles in cultural history already given. What may be
indicated in conclusion are one or two of the ways in which our general
assumptions may have altered in the interval.

One oppressive experience to which we are all at present exposed on
an unprecedented scale is inflation. Nowadays this exercises a distinct
restraint on discussions of what used to be called ‘The Price Revolution
of the Sixteenth Century’. Economists now freely admit that they cannot
explain, let alone control, our predicament; likewise economic historians
are more reticent when dealing with the milder upheavals of the mid-
1 500’s, whose beginnings in foreign exploration and exploitation are
touched on below.

Another closed episode was reopened when the late Pope John XXIII
convoked the Second Vatican Council in 1962. Or rather a whole range
of attitudes and actions, formerly regarded as irreversibly incompatible
with the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, once
again emerged as possibilities. The role and authority of an ecumenical
council was one such matter. Church historians of the medieval and
Renaissance periods had accepted that the efforts of conciliarists at
Constance and Basle had been frustrated by Trent and finally annihilated
by the subservience of Vatican I (1869-70), which saw the proclamation
of papal infallibility as a dogma. Now once again the place of the bishop
in church government may be re-examined historically ; ‘ head and mem-
bers ’ has taken on renewed actuality. Beyond that the question of a
married priesthood, of the endowment and financial control of the Roman
Church even in areas where it is ‘official’, of the Cup for the laity (already
an issue in Bohemia as Hus lay in prison at Constance), all these burning
topics may now freely be debated by Roman Catholic historians, and for

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

PREFACE

others have lost their confessional bitternesses. They went with simplifi-
cation of the Roman liturgy and the use in it of the vernacular (a further
blow for Latin!). In these and other ways what had seemed final para-
graphs may become the beginnings of new chapters.

The spiritual life of pre-Reformation Europe is another field which
is somewhat neglected in this volume, for the reason that historians in-
terested in it had not yet published their work, save for the scholars who
had dealt with the German mystics and the Brethren of the Common Life.
Even the parish clergy, dealt with severely below, often had a worthwhile
social role in the many confraternities and guilds of the period, them-
selves in many aspects ‘ religious ’ in the largest sense of the term. Charity
and good works were a prominent part of the living and the dying of
ordinary people everywhere, as W. K. Jordan has shown for England in
his many writings, and as Brian Pullan has shown for Venice. The icono-
graphy of such spirituality was the subject of that fine study: Alberto
Tenenti, II senso della morte e I'amore della vita nel Rinascimento (1957).

An equally serious ambiguity surrounds many of the political solutions
which used to seem fixed and certain not so long ago. It is now far from
easy to ignore the fact that our world may change out of recognition.
The old truths seem to have less force: England and Scotland joined by
marriage in 1503 led ineluctably to the later United Kingdom; the even
more famous marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in the end produced a
kingdom of Spain. (I notice with some shame that on p. 5 below I wrote
of the ‘final emergence of a pattern of international relationships’.) The
dislocations resulting from the Second World War, it seemed twenty-five
years ago, would sooner or later be cancelled out: there would again be —
to take a case in point — one Germany, just as France, Spain, the U.K.
would remain unchanged. In our own day devolution has everywhere
powerful advocates and there is no state large or small which can be sure
that its past will determine its future. ‘ Nothing is inevitable until it has
happened.’ The consequences of any public event are quite incalculable.
All of this is a further reminder that ‘definitive history’ is no longer on
the agenda (see below pp. xxiv-xxvi), despite the authoritative appearance
and the continued viability of the Cambridge Histories.

January 1975 D.H.

xii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND
THE MODERN HISTORIAN

By Sir George Clark

T he original Cambridge Modern History, to which the present series
of volumes is the successor, was planned by the first Lord Acton in
the year 1896, and its publication was completed when the atlas
volume appeared in 1912. 1 It has been familiar ever since as a standard
work, both a book of reference and a book to read, and it was the most
influential survey in the English language of the history of the five
previous centuries as they appeared to the scholars of that time. In British
universities history, as a subject for examinations, was then attracting
considerable, and growing, numbers of candidates. The same interest
spread downwards into the schools and outwards through the ranks of
educated men and women, bringing with it a demand for historical books
and for new kinds of historical books. This change in the content of
education was due to many changes in the public mind. One body of
educational reformers promoted the teaching of history, while another
promoted that of natural science, as alternatives to the more established
subjects, especially the Greek and Latin classics; but the propaganda
within the educational world echoed opinions which were current out-
side it. There was a utilitarian demand for more knowledge of history,
appropriate enough at a time when British governments were assuming
new functions at home and becoming more closely involved in inter-
national politics, so that the public had to discuss many issues which
could scarcely be explained except in their historical setting. There was
also an enthusiasm for history as a literary study, enlarging the mind,
training political judgment and even confirming moral character. The
imposing figures of the two historians who had become bishops, Stubbs
and Creighton, stood among the eminent Victorians. The imperialistic
mood of the time had but recently lost its historian, Sir John Seeley.
Above all there was a belief that a new science of history, more impartial
and more exact than anything previously practised, had provided a key to
the past and the future. Samuel Rawson Gardiner was demonstrating
what the method could do for English history, and a number of historians
were available who had trained themselves in the same arduous technique.
Yet there was a shortage of recent English books on continental history.
There were few, if any, on a large scale worth mentioning except Creighton’s

1 An account of the planning and editing, fuller than that which follows here, is in the
Cambridge Historical Journal, vn (1945), pp. 57ff.

a xvii ncmh 1

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

History of the Papacy and Seeley’s Life of Stein. For ordinary purposes it
was still necessary to use older writers like Robertson, Coxe, Prescott,
Motley and even Carlyle.

Some of these things must have been in the minds of the Syndics of the
Cambridge University Press, one of whom was the great historian
Maitland, when in 1896 they invited Lord Acton to consider undertaking
the general direction of a History of the World. Acton had entered on
his office as Regius Professor of Modem History in the previous year,
and he had not decided what work to do in addition to giving his lectures.
Of all men he had the strongest faith in the new scientific history. It was
for this that he had stood up in the controversies of his younger days when,
as an editor of periodicals, he had tried to show that his Church would
further her own ends if she encouraged those of science ‘which are truth’
and those of the State ‘which are liberty’. He did not hesitate for long
before accepting the Syndics’ invitation. ‘ Such an opportunity ’, he wrote,
‘ of promoting his own ideas for the treatment of history has seldom been
given to any man.’

Among the adjustments of the plan which preceded Acton’s final
acceptance was one which must be noticed here. The Syndics cut down
their original scheme, so that now it was to include ‘ Modern History only,
beginning with the Renaissance’. There had already been writers before
this time who maintained that this familiar, or even customary, division
of history into two chapters in or about the fifteenth century was less
appropriate to the subject-matter than a division at a later point, perhaps
somewhere in the seventeenth. This view attracts historians who wish to
minimise the importance of the earlier and emphasise that of the later
changes; but for two reasons it seems not to merit much discussion here.
In the first place it implies that the divisions of books and chapters belong
to the nature of things and not merely to convenience in writing and
teaching. Secondly, the Cambridge Medieval History has been published,
ending where the Modern History began, and therefore when the present
series of volumes was planned the date for its beginning was no longer an
open question. Something may, however, be said about the wider and
more substantial problem, whether there is a difference of kind between
modem history and other, earlier, sorts of history.

Such a difference between the more and the less remote is implied in
many of our habits of thought and speech. More than one Roman author
of the first century a.d. discussed the question where it is proper to draw
the line which separates the ancients from the moderns. Most people still
assume that one or more such lines ought to be drawn, if only to divide
up the past into manageable units ; but their reasons for thinking so reveal
endless disagreements. Some of them give the name of modem to the
history of any periods recent enough to have left answers in writing to
such questions as we are disposed to ask about them. Ancient or medieval

xviii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

history, on this view, relates to ages in which men’s minds worked
differently from ours: for instance they were blind to the advantages of
digesting their experience into statistical or even chronologically accurate
statements. Some people, however, believe that human nature never
changes. They are content to distinguish the remoter ages, which it is hard
to understand because our information about them is scanty, from the
nearer, which it is equally hard to understand because our information
about them is too voluminous. Writers of this latter complexion have,
to be sure, looked more favourably on later than on earlier periods,
because, as one of them remarked ‘ Historical science ... is always
becoming more possible; not solely because it is better studied, but
because, in every generation, it becomes better adapted for study’. 1
Unhappily, however, there are some who maintain that the mere notion
of modem history is absurd. On the one hand there is the proposition
that ‘modem history’ is a contradiction in terms. History, we are told, is
in its essence the reverse of modem; what makes it history is that it is
different from our knowledge of the present, so that, unless they start
from the assumption that the past is finished and done with, historians
cannot be historians at all. However we define it we must recognise that
history deals with the past; whatever we may mean by ‘modem’ we must
mean something closely related to the present. The more anything belongs to
history, it would seem, the less modem it must be, and conversely the more
modem it is, the less it can be historical. If we do not like this, we may turn
to the opposing proposition, equally plausible, equally sparkling with para-
dox, if, perhaps, equally shallow, that ‘modem history’ is a tautology. All
history is modern, or in more familiar words, ‘every true history is ideally
contemporary’, 2 for if there were no continuity between past and present;
if the historian, living as he must live in the present, could not assimilate
the past into his present, then he could not know it or write anything about
it that was either true or intelligible to his contemporaries.

Although we are so far from agreeing about what they are doing or why
they do it, a very large number of men and women, larger than ever before,
spend some or all of their working time on research into modem history.
A few of them work by themselves, but, since they use books or manu-
scripts prepared by other people, even the research of these hermits is a
social activity. The great majority belong to organisations of various kinds,
research institutes, universities, academies, publishing societies, national
or international associations of historians or of students of special
branches of history. They contribute to journals, reviews, and research
periodicals. Librarians, archivists and museum officials, many of them
highly expert, collect, arrange and make available for them an immense

1 J. S. Mill, ‘Additional Elucidations of the Science of History ’ in System of Logic (i 843).

* This is the form of the phrase in B. Croce, Storia, cronaca, e false storie (1912), p. 2,
reprinted in Teoria e storia della storiografia (1917), p. 4.

xix t - 3

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

apparatus comprising both raw and half-finished materials and the finished
products of earlier investigation. By correspondence, conferences and
other contacts these organisations are linked with one another and with
other component parts of the world of science and learning. Those who
work in and for them think of research in modem history as a going
concern, an immense organisation of workers.

Systematic instruction in methods of historical research has become a
settled part of the routine of universities, and there are many text-books
setting out its technique. Some are general; others deal with what are
portentously called ‘auxiliary sciences’, such as chronology, biblio-
graphy, palaeography, diplomatic, and the study of seals, which is some-
times called sigillography and sometimes, even less gracefully, sphragistics.
It has, however, been held that, just as most historians are eclectic in the
general ideas which they apply in their work, depending for them on non-
historical writers, so most of the actual operations carried out in the course
of historical research have been derived from other studies which would
not ordinarily be called historical. They are applications of the habits of
mind which distinguish scholarly from unscholarly work. Some of these
were familiar to lawyers long before they were thought to be necessary for
historians. It was not lawyer-like in the sixth century to give an opinion
on one particular section of a law without looking through the whole ; 1
now it is also not historian-like. In the fifteenth century the jurists of
Europe in general were skilful in deciding on the authenticity of old
documents and establishing their purport. Ecclesiastics were at work on
the relationships of different systems of reckoning time. Classical scholars
were improving the emendation of corrupted texts, and in the course of
time historians availed themselves of all these older and newer kinds of
skill, just as they followed the general movement of thought by elimi-
nating miracles and the influence of the stars from their narratives. In
later centuries they took over from natural science the ambition to frame
general laws, and to explain particular events or the broader course of
history by some evolutionary principle. Along with these governing ideas,
they borrowed many devices of detail. Recently they have busied them-
selves with graphs and curves and statistical tables. Beginning in economic
history these have come to be used in such different fields as biblio-
graphical and ecclesiastical history. Some historians regard their task as
a special kind of inductive reasoning, distilling the truth from an exhaustive
examination of all the available evidence. They aim at ‘total cover’ of
their subject-matter, and this in spite of an uneasy suspicion that the
subject-matter even of a narrow, particular history may be in some way
inexhaustible. No historian hitherto has had at his command all the
sources which might be relevant to his subject ; none has ever completed

1 Digest, i, 3, 24: Cels as Lib. VIII digestorum. IncivUe est nisi tota lege perspecta una
aliqua particula eius proposita iudicare vel respondere.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

his work so that no newly emerging source could invalidate it. However
limited the subject, and however few the aspects from which it could be
approached, the bulk of the relevant materials will be so great that the
historian who tries to acquaint himself with all of them must give up the
attempt to handle them all for himself. He may trustingly accept what other
scholars tell him about this or that outlying field. He may be content to
make his contribution to the joint research of some great organisation which
provides somewhere for the co-ordination of his discoveries with others. In
any case the nearer we come to ‘total cover’, the further we move from
the primitive historian-like exactness. It seems that historians have adopted
a miscellaneous collection of other people’s tools.

These appearances are deceptive. There is a method or technique or
approach which is distinctive of history, and by which historians make
their own contribution to thought. All their subjects belong to the study
of human life in the framework of time, and their speciality is to treat
their subject-matter as organically related by successiveness, by sequence
in time. Any investigator who sets out to digest a confused mass of
evidence needs some means of distinguishing what is relevant to his
purpose from what is not relevant. He must be able to sift his evidence
so that, once he finds a sufficient proof, or the best available proof, for
a conclusion, he can discard all the rest as superfluous. He aims at
extracting from each item that and only that which it and it alone can
contribute to the knowledge of his subject. Lawyers are guided by rules
about what kinds of evidence are admissible; scientists plan their experi-
ments so as to yield the answers to set questions. Historians have to sort
out their evidence from all the books and manuscripts and material
objects which may include relevant information. Among these there may
be written or printed documents or material things which actually were
parts of the events or times which the historian studies. There are also all
the contemporary or subsequent writings, pictures and other objects which
give information about former events without having formed parts of
them. It may happen that nothing has survived from the event itself, and
yet we may have abundant means of knowing about it. There is a general
presumption that the historian can make a first rough grading of his
materials by trusting his evidence more the earlier it is in time. Many
historians distinguish original or primary from secondary authorities.
This ceases to be a sharp distinction as soon as anything is included in the
primary class besides the materials actually surviving from the events.
A report of a speech, in a newspaper or a diplomatic dispatch, may be
written immediately after the speech is delivered, but it is not so com-
pletely primary as a tape-recording: in however subordinate a way,
another personality intrudes and may bring in errors or even falsifications.
A summary written afterwards, even by the speaker himself, is still further
away. For many kinds of occurrences over long stretches of time memoirs

xxi

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

and histories afford the best evidence we have, but this is not only more
remote; it is tinged with the personalities of the writers. All interpretation
rests on the selection of evidence, and whenever evidence has been selected,
whether by chance or deliberately, the selection governs any possible
interpretation. Since, either intentionally or by accident, all our authorities
have been selected, this means that they must all be examined in the light
of all that we can know about their lost context.

The distinction between primary and secondary authorities is thus
neither as simple nor as useful as it appears at first sight. Historians who
regard their work as the answering of questions, even when they know
that its progress must change the form of the questions themselves, are
disposed to approach the primary authorities through the secondary.
There are obvious advantages in doing this. If a historian confined him-
self to studying only the first-hand authorities or the nearest that he could
get to first-hand, he might spend hours in deciphering manuscripts which
had already been printed and could be read in as many minutes. If,
among printed works, he read only the original documents, he would have
to do over again for himself whatever his predecessors had done that
might lighten his task. Strictly speaking it is impossible to derive his-
torical knowledge only from primary authorities. Merely by knowing
that such authorities exist and where he is to find them, the historian
knows something about them from outside. The disputes of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries about the authority of scripture and tradition in
ecclesiastical matters turned on similar issues, and John Selden annihi-
lated the argument that belief and practice should or could be founded
on the authority of scripture alone. He said: ‘Say what you will against
tradition, we know the signification of words by nothing but tradition. . .
take these words, In principio erat verbum. How do you know those words
signify, In the beginning was the word, but by tradition, because someone
has told you so.’ 1 As history cannot be founded on knowledge of primary
authorities alone, the best way not to be misled by the errors and accre-
tions or omissions of later writers is to study these later writers and then
work back from them to their sources.

It does indeed often happen that a historian sets out to correct an
authorised version but fails to free himself from its assumptions and
adduces new evidence without seeing that it is decisive. Others who, for
any reason, are free from his assumptions, see the effect of this evidence
more clearly, and it is natural to infer that the way to see everything
clearly is to empty the mind of all assumptions whatsoever. This is one,
but only one, of the reasons why some historians exalt primary and despise
secondary authorities. Another is that the approach from secondary
authorities involves the temptation to read history backwards. Some
eminent historians condemned the imperfections of one age by comparison
1 Table Talk, ed, S. H. Reynolds (1892), p. cxxvii.

xxii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

with the successes of another or judged by results, or judged by the
standards of their own time. Others may avoid these errors and yet may
unconsciously see the earlier period through the eyes of their own, or of
some intermediate time. It has been said, for instance, that Johan
Huizinga, in spite of all his learning and sympathy, saw the age of
Erasmus too much from the point of view of the eighteenth century; and
indeed scholars who value lucidity of thought and expression must
always find it hard to depart from the judgments of the eighteenth century.
To study history forwards would be to plunge into the moving stream of
events, identifying oneself in imagination with the time, knowing and
feeling only what could be known and felt then. This is what Samuel
Rawson Gardiner tried to do: he worked through mountains of con-
temporary books, pamphlets, statutes, dispatches, and letters, day by day
and year by year, not looking ahead into the next batch of materials to see
what the outcome of anything was going to be. And any historian may be
overtaken by the feeling that he has left and forgotten his own circum-
stances and become one with the world of the old book or parchment in
his hand. This feeling comes most perfectly to those who are very learned
and yet keep alive the poet in them; but there are many more to whom it
seems to be an end worth pursuing in itself, and worth transmitting by the
magic of good writing to every reader who can receive it. Nor is this only
a question of emotional experience : the scientific historian also will prize
the authenticity of the best sources. If he can reconstruct the past, and
eliminate from his mind everything that came to pass afterwards, he will
have isolated the pure object of his study. Many teachers of historical
method, therefore, advise their pupils to go straight to the original
authorities and to master them first. The most austere adherents of this
doctrine give no references in their footnotes to the works of previous
historians, or to any of their contemporaries except the compilers of such
monographs as approximate to the character of mere precis of materials.
They do indeed use dictionaries, catalogues, and works of reference of
many other kinds ; but these too appear to be impersonal, as innocent of
bias or interpretation as the Nautical Almanac. The technique of using
them, the application of auxiliary sciences, has its own innocent delights,
and ‘pure history’ seems to be an end in itself, an aesthetic activity,
untroubled by utilitarian aims or pressure from the outer world.

This was not the attitude of the historians who created the Cambridge
Modern History. There were, of course, many varieties of method within
their school, and no convenient name has been found for describing their
highest common factor. They are sometimes called liberal historians; but
the word ‘liberal’ has many meanings. On the Continent it often carries
an implication of unfriendliness to churches or even to religion; but in
England among the great writers of this school were the bishops, Stubbs
and Creighton, and the zealous Roman Catholic Lord Acton. In some

xxiii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

respects they carried on the eighteenth-century attitude, especially in
rejecting as untrue what seemed inherently improbable; in others, from
the early days of their greatest master Leopold von Ranke, they were
influenced by the romantic movement, which emphasised the differences,
insuperable as it was supposed, between races, or nationalities, or times.
What they had in common is most easily seen from their relation to their
sources. During the nineteenth century the sum of historical knowledge
received enormous additions from the opening of archives. Governments
had for a considerable time admitted approved persons to read among
their accumulated papers, and had even spent large sums on printing
selections of documents relating to earlier times. Now, one by one, they
opened their repositories more freely. All of them still kept some papers
under lock and key, and drew a line between the older papers which were
open to search, and those so close to the present that they must be
reserved; but well before the end of the century it was normal for a
civilised capital to have some virtually public search-rooms where official
historical records were accessible. Most of the historians who used them
were learned in the printed literature of their subjects, and most of them
worked either alone or with the help of at most a few copyists. Con-
fronted by enormous masses of papers most of which had been unread
from a time soon after they were written, they had no temptation to try
to read every word that bore on their subjects. That had to wait until
inventories and catalogues were much improved not only in the official
archives but in the great libraries as well. They could only pick out the
plums, and these were the records from which the accepted version could
be corrected, or a decision made between conflicting versions. Nine-
teenth-century historians, like nineteenth-century scientists, prided them-
selves on their discoveries: to Acton Ranke was first and foremost a
pathfinder. The advance of historical studies appeared as the detection of
error by the touchstone of accurate knowledge. Much importance was
therefore attached to emending texts so as to restore the authentic words
of documents which had been garbled or misread. Next, the ranking of
authorities was studied. Like the classical scholars who studied the
derivation of manuscripts, the historians invented systems for tracing
back historical statements to their sources, and so were able to reject the
derivative and draw their own conclusions from the primary. They looked
with little favour on probabilities or corroborative evidence. They scored
so many successes in disposing of lies or legends by the confrontation of
crucial facts that they came to think of facts as the indestructible atoms
by the adding of which together true history could be composed. With
something of this sort in mind they looked forward to a future when it
would be possible to write ‘ definitive history ’.

Historians of a later generation do not look forward to any such
prospect. They expect their work to be superseded again and again. They

xxiv

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

consider that knowledge of the past has come down through one or
more human minds, has been ‘ processed ’ by them, and therefore cannot
consist of elemental and impersonal atoms which nothing can alter. They
do not even ascribe these qualities to the material objects which form the
evidence for archaeology in all ages. A flint implement, however durable,
and a pyramid, however large, have not yielded all their testimony until
we have examined them in their context, until, for instance, we know how
they and not others like them have survived until our time. The exploration
seems to be endless, and some impatient scholars take refuge in scepticism,
or at least in the doctrine that, since all historical judgments involve
persons and points of view, one is as good as another and there is no
‘objective’ historical truth.

The nineteenth-century cult of facts was intended, among other
purposes, to guard against this relativism. Few of the historians were
speculative enough to inquire what facts are. It appeared sufficient that
they were not fancies, nor theories ; the adjective most commonly applied
to them was ‘hard’. Whatever else might be open to question, they
seemed real. They seemed to be components of a real past which was
implied by the study of history itself. When we set out to restore a
damaged inscription, we act on the assumption that it was once complete,
and that the words it then included were there and were what they were
whether we succeed in recovering them or not. In the same way when we
set out to discover any missing fact, or to correct any historical statement,
we assume that both a known and an unknown past exist. Some such
assumption indeed is built into the structure of our Indo-European
languages: the tenses of the verbs imply time and change, and some of
them imply degrees of continuity and discontinuity between the past and
the present. We know some of the past and we may know more. In
moving through the past from the known to the unknown, we apply our
customary tests for distinguishing true knowledge from opinion. One of
these is coherence. If a pretended new fact is inconsistent with our know-
ledge of the past, one or the other must be amended or rejected. The real
past, known and unknown, forms a coherent whole ; but it is not merely
a whole of which every single component may be challenged by some new
discovery. Besides being coherent, it is in some way fixed. Nothing can
undo it, and that is a significant statement, not a mere commonplace.
There is an old saying that God himself cannot cancel the past, cannot
unmake the facts :

Hoc namque dumtaxat negatum etiam Deo est
Quae facta sunt, infecta posse reddere . 1

Research workers whose methods imply that there is a real past with
a coherent structure, and who are constantly becoming more skilful in

1 This is Casaubon’s translation in his edition of Aristotle (1590) of the fragment quoted
in the Nicomachaean Ethics 1 139 b 9, from the dramatist Agathon.

XXV

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

learning more about it, easily forget that only an infinitesimal fraction of
that whole can ever be known. Most of the past has vanished and can
never be recovered by the means at our disposal. Out of the millions upon
millions of men, women and children who have lived on the surface of the
globe, there are indeed some few millions of whom something is recorded ;
but it would require many volumes to set down all that passed through
the consciousness of any one of them in an hour, and, in comparison with
such a record as that, the whole of our historical knowledge is pro-
portionately less than a single comma surviving from a lost encyclopaedia.
This does not only mean that we must make the best of what little we can
know. It also means that the collector’s notion of total cover must be
inappropriate to history. It means, further, that the function of the
historian is not to be compared with that of the map-maker, who repro-
duces on a smaller scale the proportions and lay-out of a piece of ground.
The map-maker, to be sure, displays the gaps in his knowledge: where
there is an unexplored desert or an uncharted sea, he leaves a blank.
Another kind of blank in his map indicates a featureless area, a part of
the earth’s surface where there is nothing that he wishes to indicate. For
the historian there is a third kind of blank, which cannot be filled by
exploration but does not indicate that there never was anything there.
If this were a comparatively small matter, it might be overcome by
reasonably inferring from the known course of events what the lost
events must have been like. Sometimes and in a small way historians do
this, as statisticians interpolate figures ; but when their task is looked at
as a whole, it appears that they must allow that there are many differences
of kind between the known and the un kn own. Their ignorance is an
essential element in their knowledge. They work with materials which
have already been fortuitously or deliberately selected; they carry the
process of selection further; but they are not merely abstracting from
a mixed mass of data. They are carrying out a kind of selection which
involves more than taking some parts and rejecting others.

If historical writing were simply putting facts together, it might be not
ordered construction but mere shapeless heaping-up. Many writers about
history have maintained that one distinction between a history and a mere
quantity of information about the past lies in the constant exercise of
judgment by the historian. This may indeed be called the classical view.
Edward Gibbon, for instance, the author of The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, who is sometimes regarded as a literary man rather than
a serious thinker, specified ‘civil prudence’ as ‘the first and most essential
virtue of an historian ’. His phrase ‘civil prudence’ has a long and curious
history . 1 Even if its early occurrences were not in his mind when he wrote,

1 It occurs in Milton’s Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (i 659), in the dedicatory letter.
In Latin Cicero has it, and it occurs in J. J. Becher, Psychosophia oder\Seelenweisheit (1678).
Grotius, Briefwisseling, ed. Molhuysen, no. 402 (1615) has ‘civilis sapientia’,

xx vi

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Gibbon was in essence repeating the opinion of Lucian, who regarded
good sense in relation to public affairs as the bom gift of the good
historian . 1 Civil prudence, or political judgment, is not a purely intel-
lectual quality; it is the capacity to judge concrete situations well, in the
sense in which we commonly speak of a good judge of a man, or a horse
or a picture.

This classical view of the historian’s procedure consorts well with the
formula that history is the consciousness of continuity, das Bewusstsein
der Continuity} It may indeed be true that, however little the past could
be known in earlier ages, when historical knowledge was scanty and was
confined to the few literate people, the past nevertheless penetrated,
informed and governed the present even more than it can nowadays.
History never supersedes but only reinforces and elucidates other older,
underlying continuities. The lowest stratum is the physical continuity of
the universe. A second underlying continuity is biological. Genealogy is
a primitive kind of history, but it did not arise from thought about given
data, namely the facts of marriages and births. The knowledge of these
facts arose in and with the knowledge of their genealogical framework as
a crystallisation within a complex experience which was instinctive, bio-
logical and social. Heredity is still one of the factors of social continuity
everywhere, and the family is still one of the fundamental institutions even
in societies where its character and functions have most changed; but
the continuity provided by the family has always been defined and
stabilised by conscious knowledge, by what we may call traditional
continuity. The successive and overlapping generations pass on acquired
aptitudes. Oral tradition, however, is not the only means by which con-
tinuity with the past is maintained intentionally. Words, even when they
are used with the most expert skill, can never revive the whole of any
experience, and so in addition to traditional words, and sometimes in
association with them, there is another way of fixing events in memory so
that they can be called up again. This is ritual. For the ordering of society
it is necessary that only those who are properly entitled, only those in due
succession to the past, should enjoy the majesty of a king or the status of
a wife, should exercise a priest’s office or a scholar’s right to teach, a land-
lord’s right to the services of his tenants, or a tenant’s right to the produce
of the soil. Of old, therefore, these titles were affirmed and fixed in the
memory of witnesses by ceremonial, as some of them still are. Not every
registry-office marriage is symbolised by a ring, but our newspapers an-
nounce actual coronations, consecrations, ordinations, investitures, degree-
givings, institutions to benefices. These are performed not because there is
any danger that the London Gazette or the legal documents relating to such
occasions may perish or be disputed ; but because there is something in

1 Quomodo Historia Conscribettda sit, 34.

* J. G. Droysen, Grundriss der Historik (1868).

xxvii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

each of them which cannot be put into words. In earlier times, even when
there was a document to embody a legal act, there was also a ritual, and
the ritual rather than the document was the act. We retain the ritual when
we distrust the efficacy of words to record the essence of the event.

Written history does indeed provide us with our surest knowledge of
the past. Written words are more precise and easier to work with, if less
expressive, than spoken, but writing has not rendered oral tradition
useless. There are stresses and intonations which can be taught but not
written and written history is still embedded in the deeper continuities,
physical, biological, ritual and traditional. They are less clear and explicit,
but they have their independent value and sometimes they can interpret
what survives in writing. All these continuities are organically connected;
all alike are means by which the present carries its past along with it, so
that history is not the continuity of human life, but the continuity made
conscious.

There is indeed one respect in which history provides a continuity
quite unlike the others. Once any of these others is interrupted it can
never be put together again. When a family has no heirs that is the end
of it; when the last minstrel dies his unwritten ballads die with him. But
history can be neglected and forgotten for centuries and yet begin afresh.
Perhaps the most striking of all historical discoveries are those made by
scholars who read lost languages. Even where the language of the sources
is well known, their nature may be forgotten. A document may appear to
mean something quite different from what it meant to its writer. Thus an
eminent English historian accused the English queen, Catherine of Aragon,
of being still loyal to her nephew Charles V because she ended a letter
to him in Spanish with the words, before her signature, ‘ who kisses your
hand’. He could have found from an elementary Spanish grammar that
this is still, as it was then, an ordinary formula for ending a letter. And if
historical research can recreate continuities by interpreting documents, in
the same way it renews them on the largest scale by bringing every kind of
relevant knowledge to bear on every aspect of the past.

The purposes of the historian are as wide as the purposes for which a
knowledge of continuity with the past may be desired. A man may wish
to draw out the continuity of some village or town or nation, of some
institution or practice or belief with its past for one or more of an immense
number of reasons. At one extreme a writer of genius like Michelet may
proclaim his own version of the grandeurs and miseries of the national
past. At the other extreme there are simple practical reasons. A town
clerk may trace the ownership of a ferry through old deeds in order to
discover who has the right to fix the toll. Lawyers constantly have
searches made to provide proofs of the claims of litigants. Political
parties set up research departments to provide materials for their decisions
on policy and for their propaganda. Lord Allenby read the campaigns of

.xxviii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

the Old Testament and the ancient Romans when he planned his conquest
of Palestine. There are equally simple emotional or aesthetic reasons. The
owner of an ancient castle, or a citizen of an ancient borough may delve
into its records from a mere sense of wonder and curiosity. Simply as an
adventure-story, a book on Napoleon’s campaigns may absorb the
attention of a man who has no interest in strategy or tactics. But in
practice it is exceptional for the historian’s interest to be simple. Usually
in the mind of any one writer different lines of interest run side by
side: many military historians write romantically, and many romantic
historians are surprised into studying the technicalities of tactics. There
are, indeed, innumerable branches of history which isolate some special
interest. In the larger universities there are specialists in legal, military,
literary, ecclesiastical and economic history as well as in the history of
certain countries and regions; some universities also make special pro-
vision for the history of the arts and sciences and of philosophy. These
special branches are, however, taught and studied in connection with
general history, which may pay more or less attention to some of them,
but somehow provides an introduction or groundwork, if not a final
summing-up, for all. This is how the current work of the great going con-
cern of historical research and teaching is organised now ; and the shape
of this organisation corresponds to the demands of a collective opinion
among the historians. Commonly it is this collective opinion which
dictates the choice of subjects. From time to time attempts are made to
show that one or other branch of history is more truly historical than the
others, or is fundamental to them; but, if we remember that all historical
research implies a real past, we shall be content to believe that any
historical investigation which is undertaken to discover truth will lay bare
part of this real past. We shall not be tempted to say that one branch of
history is more legitimate than another, that its historical character
depends on its choice of subject within the infinite field of the past.

What historical subjects are studied and for what reasons depends on
many seemingly unrelated circumstances of human society ; and the same
is true of the other activities which precede historical study and on which
it depends. First there are the recording activities. These make provision
beforehand for those who may need knowledge of what will then have
become the past. In our literate world a private individual whose affairs
are simple may keep no records except a bank pass-book and a few letters
and receipts, but a rich man may need muniment-rooms with a staff of
clerks. Businesses, even small businesses, are embarrassed to find room
for the records that accumulate in their offices. Government departments
and local authorities often employ trained archivists, who follow elaborate
regulations in deciding what to preserve and what to destroy among the
papers deposited with them. There are experts, whether professional
or belonging to voluntary societies, who give advice to firms on the

xxix

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

selecting and preservation of their records and on the disposal of those
which deserve to survive but for which they have no room. Keepers of
records must understand difficult technical questions of registration and
storage and such considerations as safe custody and secrecy. But, in
spite of all this organisation and skill, the quantity of records increases
beyond the point where there is any prospect that any large proportion of
them will be useful. One after another new means of recording have been
called into use by the immediate needs of an increasingly complex society.
Shorthand, the typewriter, sound-recording, photography, and the cinema
all leave behind from the day’s work their heaps of material.

During the period, roughly the last sixty years, when this plethora
has spread from office to office all over the world the scope of historical
studies has been broadening. The numbers of those engaged in them has
multiplied many times; the variety of calls on their services has grown
equally quickly; they study more aspects of life and more periods; in
particular they have begun to examine the very recent past. The physical
multiplication of materials seems for these purposes to be a gain. If they
are hard to manage, co-operative research can apply the principle of the
division of labour. It is impossible to be sure that any piece of paper may
not supply the answer to some question which no one can foresee now, or
fill a gap in a picture which no one has yet wanted to draw. We therefore
constantly hear appeals for the preservation of records; but sooner or
later, and more cheaply and easily soon than late, enormous masses of
records must be destroyed. Recording has indeed reached a point at
which it can only with difficulty be made to serve the less immediate of
the purposes of the historian. It has even reached a point where the mass
of records clogs the wheels of administration. Every day thousands of
committeemen sit down before piles of paper which they cannot read
through. However good their summaries and indexes and tables of
contents may be, superfluous thousands of words will prevent some of
them from reading the few words that matter. It has therefore become
a problem for administrators to find methods of limiting the output of
official papers, in other words of selecting records, for the short-term
purposes of current business rather than with an eye to the long-term needs
of historians. The same man sometimes exercises both kinds of selection as
he goes along. A statesman who intends to write his memoirs may keep
a file for tit-bits which might easily become submerged in the ocean of
a departmental registry. But the two kinds of selection, normally two
successive stages in winnowing, are essentially different even when they are
carried on simultaneously by one man.

Historians naturally try to ensure that their interests are considered
when any selection is made, and administrators may be willing or reluctant
to comply. In the same way they may or may not allow the students easy
access to the records once they are selected. For centuries past there have

XXX

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

been classes of records which members of the public had a legal right to
consult for certain purposes: the wills of deceased persons are shown
because it is desirable that those entitled to benefit under them should
know their rights. The general public also has a legal right to know about
certain kinds of proceedings, for instance those in the British parliament.
This particular right was conceded after long and bitter disputes. The
modem States are the owners of the records which form the main data of
some of the social sciences ; but they have only granted access to them on
their own terms. They have also asserted their rights of ownership over
official papers which have been carried away into private possession,
partly in order to provide themselves with the historical knowledge which
they may need, but partly also in order to withhold it from other States
or from individuals who may use it against them. Since in earlier times
they succeeded only imperfectly in maintaining control over the materials
to which they had a legal right, and since complementary materials were,
lawfully or unlawfully, in private ownership, it was a natural completion
of the opening of the public archives for States to encourage the opening of
private archives, for instance by having them catalogued and publishing
parts of their contents, and by controlling or subsidising libraries which
collected manuscripts. As historians thus came to know more about these
collections they applied to their owners for permission to work in them,
not always successfully. Every improvement of transport and photo-
graphy made access to documents physically easier and so made any
failure to see a document seem the more regrettable. At the same time,
since history has become the basis of the education of large numbers of
people, and a favourite way of studying and explaining public affairs, the
writing of history ranks as a public, or at least a socially valuable,
function, and it is inferred that the historian, as a servant of the public,
has a right of access to his materials.

The relation of historians to the State is so many-sided that this claim
to access is sometimes made by the State on their behalf, but in other cases
it is a claim of theirs against the State, It is almost a necessary consequence
of the nature of historical writing that all those who engage in a contest for
power or who attempt to control opinion should wish to be served by
historians. The Burgundian princes of the fifteenth century had official
chroniclers and official historiographers, the distinction being perhaps
between those who dealt with current and those who dealt with former
events. From the seventeenth century or earlier princes published large
extracts from their own records in order to enable historians to write
history. With the growth of popular education in the nineteenth century,
and with the increase in the size and cost of libraries and museums, States
applied their resources to maintaining huge institutions for research and
education. The enjoyment of works of art and of historical monuments
spread through all classes, and so access to historical materials has come

xxxi

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

to be claimed as part of a general claim of the public to enjoyments which
used to be denied or restricted by owners of property. This claim has
gathered strength when property-owners have made voluntary con-
cessions to it. The State has reinforced it and taken advantage of it by
extending its functions as a universal cataloguer and organiser of access.
The National Portrait Gallery collects information about all British
historical portraits; the National Register of Archives catalogues all
ancient documents, whoever owns them. Catalogues exist to be used;
they promote and assist the will to see the catalogued objects. Depart-
ments of State may make lists for their own use, as the Ordnance Survey
did of ancient cadastral maps, but once they are known to exist they can
scarcely be withheld from use for the wider purposes of research.

The desire of public authorities to survey and collect and use historical
information bearing on their functions thus stimulates the desire of
members of the public to look at it for themselves. This in turn is separated
by a very short distance from the demand of the public for knowledge of
the proceedings of government. There is a perpetual pulling and pushing
between journalists and elected representatives who want to unearth
buried treasure of information and men in office who want to work un-
disturbed. Most of the historians in the present-day Europe are either civil
servants of the State, like the professors in most of the continental uni-
versities, or members of universities which are subsidised and partly
controlled by the States; yet this subordination to the machinery of
organised society need not hamper their freedom as scholars. There are
infinite varieties in the pressure which society may exercise upon the
historian. It may be as crippling when it is exercised by a foundation or
a board of trustees or the highest authority in a self-governing university
as when it is exercised by a minister. Fortunately there are equally varied
and adaptable defences by which the historian can protect his right and
duty to seek and disseminate the truth. These are a social right and a
social duty: they cannot exist except in the context of other rights and
duties which also are valid. They may therefore be involved in conflicts
with other rights and other obligations. Freedom of thought, like any
other freedom, implies responsibility. It is sometimes right and it is
sometimes a duty for a statesman or an official or a private man to
maintain secrecy. The historian serves society by his judgment, and, as we
have seen, he cannot divest himself of his responsibility by acting like
a copying-machine and leaving it to others, his readers, to judge after he
has merely transcribed.

The social function of historians has always varied and will always vary
with the changing social scene; but there is always tension between the
historian’s standards in his craft and the demands of his readers. Whether
he writes for an individual patron, or for a government department or for
such members of the general public as he can induce to read his book, he

xxxii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

must to some extent supply a demand. Even if this is merely a demand for
true information about a subject or true answers to questions, he must be
prepared to face the problem of the missionary, who must state his new
message at least in the old language, if not in the old thought-forms to
which his hearers are accustomed. The fewer of their beliefs he wishes to
challenge, the easier will be his task of transposition. When the original
Cambridge Modern History was planned it seemed to Acton that, without
challenging beliefs, it could be a ‘chart and compass for the coming
century’. The chart and the compass are products of science. They are
completely impersonal ; the least element of bias or interested misrepre-
sentation would spoil them. So far the metaphor admirably expresses the
nature of modern history. But the navigator must understand something
of their scientific nature if he is to use these aids, and they will not decide
his destination for him. The metaphor does not show what corresponds to
his training and his sailing-orders if history or any other social science is
a chart and compass. Half a century ago it was still natural for a European
thinker to assume that, in spite of their diversities, the states of the
civilised world were all more or less effectively controlled by educated
elements and in accordance with more or less generally accepted opinions
as to the ends of government. The idea of the social sciences, and in
particular of history, appropriate to this view was the ‘ liberal ’ view that it
was a scale-reduction of the facts, with the necessary compass-like specific
interpretations. In our altered world this view is no longer tenable. Many
social scientists have found that they cannot pursue their inquiries unless
they discuss their purposes : they prepare charts but they also compare one
destination with another. For the historian the principle that his work is
the exercise of judgment implies that he may have to engage in the choice
of ends. If he accepts the limitations of the court historian, the patriotic
historian or the writer of any kind of commissioned or sponsored history,
he either renounces his function of judging or consciously proceeds on the
hypothesis, which he or his reader remains free to reject, that the end
prescribed by his employer is good. The historian may judge it to be his
duty to obey the law regarding the disclosure of the contents of the public
records. He may judge it to be his duty to disobey; but in either event he
forms a judgment. Whatever he conceals and whatever he discloses,
whether to the general public or to a government or an employer, what-
ever lines of investigation he follows and whatever lines he avoids, he is
making decisions in which society has an interest, actual or potential. If
there could be social knowledge entirely free from the factor of judgment,
then, on the one hand, there could be an impersonal and mechanistic
science of society and, on the other, an unqualified right to freedom in
constructing it. Social policy could then be separated from social science.
The division would be like that which, in some systems of government, is
supposed to distinguish policy from administration. The latter distinction

3 xxxiii ncmh i

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

is indeed often, if not always, conventional, arbitrary and illusory; the
former might well be like it in that too. It is outside our present scope to
discuss this question as it affects the social sciences in general, but so far as
history is concerned we may affirm that, if it is a science, it is a science of
values.

This new issue of the Cambridge Modern History has been planned
neither as a stepping-stone to definitive history, nor as an abstract or a
scale-reduction of all our knowledge of the period, but as a coherent body
of judgments true to the facts. Over a great part of the field its aims will
coincide with those which Lord Acton formulated for its predecessor; but
it is necessary to recede from one of Acton’s principles. He expected his
contributors to suppress or conceal their individual convictions, and we
know on the high authority of his pupil Dr Gooch that ‘he never wrote
or uttered a word as Regius Professor which revealed him as a member of
one church rather than another ’. 1 In the triumphant phase of liberal
historiography this kind of impartiality seemed attainable; but even for
Acton there were limits to the application of the principle. In his central
concepts of freedom and progress he asserted opinions which were not
above controversy even then. With no weakened devotion to truth,
historians in our self-critical age are aware that there will not be general
agreement with their conclusions, nor even with some of the premisses
which they regard as self-evident. They must be content to set out their
own thought without reserve and to respect the differences which they
cannot eradicate.

In Lord Acton’s plan for the History there were some impressive and
characteristic sentences about the concept of general history.

Universal history [he wrote] is not the sum of all particular histories, and ought to
be contemplated, first, in its distinctive essence, as Renaissance, Reformation,
Religious Wars, Absolute Monarchy, Revolution, etc. The several countries may
or may not contribute to feed the main stream, and the distribution of matter must
be made accordingly. The history of nations that are off the line must not suffer; it
must be told as accurately as if the whole was divided into annals. But attention
ought not to be dispersed, by putting Portugal, Transylvania, Iceland, side by side
with France and Germany. I wish to speak of them when they are important, and
not, whether or not, according to date.

When a country first came into ‘the line’, as Russia did under Peter the
Great, there was to be ‘a sufficient and connected retrospect’ of its
former history; when one dropped out, as Venice did early in the
seventeenth century, there should be ‘ a prospective sketch ’. He acknow-
ledged that there would be difficulties in putting all this into practice, as
indeed proved to be the case when, after his untimely death, his plan was
executed by other hands ; but his governing conception remains as that of
this second Cambridge Modern History. It has not indeed been possible
1 History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1913), p. 387.

xxxiv

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

merely to revise the original fourteen volumes and bring them up to date.
Not only has research added much to our knowledge of almost every
country and period; new methods are applied and new questions are
asked. There are far more books in the English language about every
department of modem history than there were fifty years ago, so that the
new Modem History need not satisfy all the requirements which the old
tried to meet, but it can fulfil a more specific purpose as a standard general
history, adapted to the needs of study and teaching in our time.

The purpose is to set out the ascertained results of research into the
history of that ‘civilisation’ which, from the fifteenth century, spread
from its original European homes, assimilating extraneous elements as it
expanded, until it was more or less firmly planted in all parts of the world.
The civilisation is to be treated in all its aspects, political, economic, social,
‘cultural’ and religious. Whenever it is possible to combine these aspects,
or some of them, in a single presentation, this will be the plan; but there
will be no forced synthesis or artificial simplification. Where the different
factors are interdependent they will be brought together, and where they
are not, they will be treated separately. When there is a common process
affecting a number of states or nations, this will provide the theme; but
where necessary there will be separate chapters or sections for the affairs
of nations or groups of nations which diverge too markedly to be treated
along with others.

The History will not give separate continuous accounts of all the
separate states; it will neither be nor include a collection of separate
national histories bound together in the same covers. It will not try to
serve the purpose of a handbook to the history of each vernacular
literature or each regional school of art. Events which are international
will be dealt with from the international point of view. Thus each war will
be described as a whole: the battle of Waterloo will not be treated (apart
from minor allusions to it) three or four times over, as an event in the
history of France, of Great Britain, of Prussia and of the Netherlands.

The course of events will not be described without reference to the
structure of society. Thus the narratives of campaigns will be in close
relation to the accounts of the art of war, and of its usages and its social
and economic aspects. The history of diplomatic negotiations will be kept
in touch with the social forces behind them. There will be links between
the political narrative and the chapters on political thought: questions
like nationality, toleration and so forth will be handled not in the abstract
but so as to convey an idea of the changes in the actual foundations of
government.

The New Cambridge Modern History follows the precedent of the older
series in not giving footnote-references for the statements in the text except
on occasions when they seem to be specially called for. This is a well-
established practice in works which give brief surveys of very wide fields,

XXXV va

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

but another difference between the old series and the new, not unrelated to
this practice, should perhaps be mentioned here. Each volume of the old
series included bibliographies for the separate chapters, sometimes with
information about unpublished manuscript sources. These bibliographies
were not intended to show what authorities the writers of the chapters had
actually used; they were to serve as guides for students of the subjects.
They were so full, and at the same time they offered so little comment, that
they proved more useful to advanced students than to general readers or
beginners in research. That in the fourth volume, to take the extreme
example, occupies 161 pages and includes a full catalogue of Lord Acton’s
collection of pamphlets on the Thirty Years War, now in the University
Library at Cambridge. At the time when the Cambridge Modern History
was published there were comparatively few historical bibliographies in
the English language. It was still advisable to insist that compilations of
this kind were necessary tools for the historian. That is no longer the case.
So many bibliographies, general and special, are available that additions
to their number can only be justified if they are appropriate, both in their
contents and in the places where they appear, to specific needs. Many,
indeed the great majority, of those who read or consult a general history,
do not require such bibliographies as the older series presented. The
editors will consider, in the course of their work, what kinds of biblio-
graphical publication will best suit the needs of the present time; but it is
not intended that such matter should be contained within the covers of
this series of volumes.

Each volume is to cover roughly a chronological period, but the
divisions of time will not be rigid, for each volume will be a self-contained
whole, carrying each subject from a real beginning to a real halt. Within
the volumes the chapters are to be divided not chronologically but by
subjects. Within each chapter the author will decide whether to follow a
chronological or a systematic plan, or a combination of the two. The
writers of the separate chapters and the editors of the separate volumes
are not bound by detailed instructions but only by their agreement in the
guiding principles which have been stated here. They represent many
schools of thought and many specialised branches of research; but so
great is their common inheritance that they hope, by means of all this
diversity, to create an articulated history.

xxxvi

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

T he fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the identification at about
the same time in Italy of a medium aevum separating the ancient
from the contemporary world were in themselves sufficient to
account for the subsequent adoption of the Renaissance as a turning-
point in the history of western society. Bacon claimed further that
printing, gunpowder and the magnet ‘ have changed the whole face and
state of things throughout the world’. The political historians of the
nineteenth century, led by Ranke, saw in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries the emergence of phenomena regarded as character-
istically ‘modem’, nation-states, bureaucracy, secular values in public
policy, and a balance of power. On top of that came the acceptance in
Europe at large of the views of Burckhardt on the civilisation of the
Renaissance in Italy. First published in i860, Burckhardt’s analysis gave
aesthetic and psychological conviction to the same attitude: the cultural
achievements at this time of the Italians form the pattern of western
values in the centuries to come. By 1 900 the current view of the break
between modem and medieval had hardened into a pedagogical dogma,
and historians in each western nation had found a convenient date round
which to manipulate the universally accepted categories. For France the
invasion of Italy (1494), for Spain the union of the Crowns (1479), for
England the establishment of the Tudors (1485), for Germany the acces-
sion of Charles V (1519) were plausible and readily accepted lines of
demarcation.

Flaws in this imposing simplification have always been discernible.
Whatever was important in Italy, for instance, had happened before the
end of the fifteenth century, both in the fields of culture and politics; had
happened, indeed, long before 1453. If Dante may be relegated to the
Middle Ages, Petrarch cannot be, and in the Florence of the generation
of Coluccio Salutati (d. 1406) nearly all that was unique in the Italian
world had been adumbrated. Even in the northern world the old divisions
have lately come to be scrutinised more sceptically. In Germany one can
call Maximilian more irresponsible than his grandson, but in his attitude
to dynasticism or German patriotism and letters can one call him more
medieval? Are not Charles VII and Louis XI of France more modern
than Charles VIII or Francis I — in their attention to administration,
domination of the Church, repression of franchises? In England the con-
ventional importance of the battle of Bosworth has been disputed by
those who wish to see Thomas More (d. 1535) as the last representative

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

of an ecumenical Christendom, by those who argue that Thomas Crom-
well inaugurated a profoundly new approach to government, and by
others who claim that the new monarchy begins not with the Tudors but
with the Yorkists.

Even more telling arguments have been advanced to throw doubt on
the importance of the older concepts. If the Renaissance ushers in the
modem world, we should find in it the roots of that most characteristic
feature of the modem world — a preoccupation with physical science. Yet
it can be shown that humanism neglected science; advances in this field
in the fifteenth century are confined to a handful of old-fashioned nomi-
nalists in Paris and Averroists in Padua. The architects of Renaissance
Italy were no better engineers than their Gothic predecessors: no wave of
mechanical inventions characterises the rebirth of learning. Ergo, because
there was no renaissance in the sciences at this time, there was no
Renaissance at all . 1 And as for the ‘discovery of the world and of man’,
with its realism and its consequent cynicism, its desire for ‘fame’ and its
cultivation of personal talent and virtu, what may we make of an Abelard,
a Jehan de Meung, a Commynes or the sculptors who took (from the
life) the sentimental virgins in Rhenish cathedrals or the botanical illus-
trations at Southwell Minster? Is not Le Petit Jehan de Saint rd a more
astringent portrayal of a new society than anything in the Decameron ?
Is not the painting of the van Eycks incomparably more concrete, prac-
tical, realistic than the dreamy, academic romanticism of Botticelli or the
learned allegories of his contemporaries in Italy? Burckhardt, besides at-
tributing unique discoveries to the Italians, attributed to them also unique
penalties — the darkly painted irreligion, cynicism and immorality which
he saw as the shadows of his bright world. Here, too, a glance at northern
Europe suggests qualifications: the brutality of the Visconti can be
paralleled in the Burgundian court; in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies no fewer than four English kings (to descend no farther down
the social scale) were deposed and murdered by successful rivals and
another was killed in battle; the Borgias were Spaniards by origin, not
Italians.

As for the geographical discoveries of the Renaissance, there is now less
confidence that they were in any genuine sense a product of the new
thought of the period. A fresh interest in the text of Ptolemy may have
been influential — but less so, we may suppose, than the writings of
Marco Polo. The motives behind Portuguese exploration (ch. xv, i) were,
to say the least, mixed; scientific cartography, a disinterested wish for
geographical knowledge were certainly there, but were equally certainly
subordinated to a programme determined by politics, religion and (in-

1 Dana B. Durand, ’Tradition and innovation in XV century Italy’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, rv (1943), pp. 1-20; Lynn Thorndike, ‘Renaissance or pre-Renaissance’,
ibid. pp. 65-74.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

creasingly) commercial advantage. Nor was the discovery of America
important at the time. It is, in fact, argued elsewhere in this volume
(ch. xvi) that the impact of the New World on Europe as a whole was not
marked until the last decade of the sixteenth century. The population of
Europe, recovering maybe from the demographic disasters of the four-
teenth century, was in no state to lend men to colonial activity ; in view of
Ottoman pressure, the Conquistadores could ill be spared ; the first effects
of the exploitation of America were due to the importation of gold and
silver, and upsetting they were for all but some lucky members of the
merchant class.

Nor can one accept uncritically the diffusion of interest in classical
antiquity and the revival of classical Latin as in themselves constituting
an unequivocal break with the past. The very remarkable spread of the
new scholarship is described below in some detail (ch. v) and if the names
of many of the erudits there assembled have all but fallen into oblivion,
sufficient of them remain as stars in the galaxy of western scholarship and
literature to make the era notable; while the cumulative effect of the
revival of letters was to produce an attitude to education the consequences
of which are with us today. One must, however, be chary of attributing
too much to the humanists, and particularly to the latter-day humanists.
Latin grammar was no novelty at the Renaissance : it was the only grammar
that had been taught for a thousand years in the West; and the methods
— indeed the text-books themselves — were for long the same. The new
grammar admittedly had a precision and an authority which were different
(and more difficult), and conversational dialogues gradually evicted dia-
lectic as the technical method of instruction. Texts of Latin authors
became purer; a greater range of authors was read; Cicero was viewed as
a man of affairs and not as a recluse, and Virgil ceased to be a magician ;
a little Greek entered the curriculum of school and university and a hand-
ful of scholars turned to Hebrew. But just as to oppose these advances to
a static medievalism is to falsify them, so if one makes the diffusion of the
new Latin the sole criterion of a changed view of the world one neglects
what is, perhaps, the more significant aspect of the Renaissance outside
Italy — its reflection in vernacular literature (ch. vi, 4). The Italians of the
quattrocento had, in fact, two admirations in literature, two groups of
‘classical’ models. Beside Cicero and Virgil we must set Dante, Petrarch
and Boccaccio. By the early sixteenth century Italian was the most
mature of the ‘modern’ languages and it was to be through the Italian
writers of the first half of the sixteenth century that northern Europe was
to acquire ail that it could most easily digest in the moral qualities evolved
in the peninsula. It was in the vernacular that these were to be most
truly expressed. Castiglione’s Courtier was soon translated into the ver-
naculars; the serious works of Bruni or Valla naturally did not lend
themselves so readily to vulgarisation. It is in Rabelais rather than in

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Erasmus that we find most faithfully displayed most of the attitudes we
regard as essentially ‘Renaissance’.

New points of view and old points of view were broadcast during the
second half of the fifteenth century by printed books, 1 and this has often
been regarded as constituting a watershed in western history. But the
importance of the printing press is analogous to the discovery of America:
it took many generations to affect men in any material way. The books
printed by the early printers were the books manufactured by hand by the
scriveners, not only the writings of contemporary authors but the old
texts which were the established classics of education, science and literature.
‘An analysis of the published output of the printers, who we must assume
knew something of the demands of the reading public, clearly demon-
strated that a great proportion of the surviving writings of the Middle
Ages were not only known but in current use and circulation contin-
uously till about 1600; though to a diminishing degree in the latter half
of the sixteenth century. ’* Nor can it confidently be argued that it needed
printing to cure illiteracy. It is as clear that the invention of printing by
moveable type was the result of a rising demand for books as it is obvious
that the greater quantity of books thus made available encouraged literacy
still further. The number of schools multiplied everywhere in the fifteenth
century, a process which was not seriously interrupted (and then only for
a short time) by the Reformation; four times as many students were
attending German universities in 1500 as had been attending them in 1400
and by the end of the fifteenth century the majority were in the arts
faculties, did not complete even a first degree and came only to learn
what would now be taught in a secondary school. Thomas More estimated
that three out of five persons in the England of his day could read — a
soberingly high proportion, even if it is limited to reading as opposed to
writing and to London rather than the country as a whole, but one which
a few scraps of evidence suggest may have been almost as true a century
earlier. 3

The criticisms advanced above do not, however, dispose of the ‘ Renais-
sance’. It is not sufficient to find in other periods evidence for behaviour
or institutions generally regarded as peculiar to a later age: one must also
determine the degree to which particular attitudes flourished at any given
moment. Viewed in this way there is no doubt that Abelard, for instance,
is an exceptional figure in the twelfth-century scene; the cultivation of
personality is rare and intermittent before the Renaissance. And so with
other fields of human activity. What is termed below in connection with

1 A brief discussion of the rise of printing will be found in vol. 11 of this History, ch. xii.

* E. P. Goldschmidt, Medieval Texts and their First Appearance in Print (Bibliographical
Society of London, 1943), p. 2.

8 Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago, 1948), pp. 156-8;
and in general J. W. Adamson, The Illiterate Anglo-Saxon (1946), ch. in.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

architecture an ‘anthropometric’ view (p. 129) cannot be denied to the
Renaissance in Italy as a whole and to its later manifestations elsewhere
in Europe. This measurement of problems, aesthetic and moral, by a
scale of human achievement, was admittedly not as ‘ pagan ’ as many (for
example Burckhardt) have supposed: it was, indeed, characteristic of the
most religious phase of all in Italy — the Platonic and Neoplatonic thought
of Florence at the end of the fifteenth century; it assumed that man’s
intellectual and his physical proportions were part of the divine structure
of the universe. Furthermore, the rapidity with which Italian educational,
economic, artistic, and political inventions were communicated to trans-
Alpine countries suggests that forces were at work outside Italy which
justify extending the term Renaissance to Europe as a whole; the peoples
of the peninsula, and in particular of the centre and north, were, in this
sense, pioneers exploring territories which were to be occupied by the
French, the Germans and the rest in the course of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.

Aside, however, from these subjective categories, the period covered by
this volume had for contemporaries a natural coherence and inevitability
which it is also the historian’s duty to analyse. In certain spheres of
public life developments were on foot which were both regarded as im-
portant at the time and were to be significant in the retrospect of later
ages. The gradual recovery of Europe from the disastrous economic
regression of the fourteenth century is clearly central, but the chronology
of this is doubtful as yet and its effects on agrarian and commercial life
cannot therefore be briefly discussed (chs. n, xvi). Another matter of
common concern was the exploration and occupation of the New World
by ‘professional’ explorers, soldiers and sailors: it is sufficient to call
attention to the discussion of this below (chs. xv, xvi). Four charac-
teristic aspects of the period are, however, worth examining further both
for their inherent interest and because they are discussed in more than
one of the following chapters. These are: the consolidation of princely
government and the decline of rivals to monarchy ; the final emergence of
a pattern of international relationships based on dynasticism; the pro-
gressive instability in, and the loss in ecumenical authority of, the Church;
and the growth of novel spiritual attitudes, both secular and religious.
These points are further examined in what follows.

Medieval treatises on government dealt with what kings should do in
order to be good. Commynes in his Memoires (finished by 1498, first
published 1524) and Machiavelli in his Prince (written 1513, published
1532) tried to deal with something different, what kings found it most
advantageous to do in order to be effective rulers. The notion that efficient
government was as worthy of investigation as the moral principles
of Christian dominion naturally took time to develop, for it involved

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

abandoning sentiments inculcated in the most influential books and pulpits
for a thousand years, sentiments, moreover, which had been in complete
sympathy with the decentralised, feudal society of the early Middle Ages :
a Machiavelli or a Commynes would have been inconceivable if there had
not been for several generations, and over much of Europe, practical
demonstrations of the thesis which they were to expound. The experience
they were digesting was, of course, vividly illuminated by contempora-
neous events, but these served merely to confirm the past, not to deny it.
In France, England and Italy in particular relatively strong kings re-
peatedly emerge from the late thirteenth century onwards: Edward I,
Edward IV, Richard III in England ; Philip IV, Charles V, Charles VII,
Louis XI in France; in Italy, let alone the precocious government of
Frederick II in Naples before 1250, the ‘tyrannies’ of more than local
significance of the Este at Ferrara, the della Scala at Verona and the
Visconti at Milan. These periods of active monarchy are, of course, not
without moments of weakness due to the resentment and obstruction of
a class of magnates for whom the situation represented decline; the strong
kings of France and England had to face internal trouble; and between
times of strong government came long and debilitating periods of re-
cession, as in England under Edward II and Henry VI, or in France for
nearly two generations after 1392. Even within a single reign monarchical
power could fluctuate enormously ; Richard II of England and Charles VII
of France must figure both as effective and as ineffective rulers. In
Italy an even more precarious situation existed : the Visconti, for instance,
faced not only disintegrating forces from within, but a slowly hardening
resistance from Venice and Florence. Yet as the fifteenth century proceeds
the momentum of monarchy noticeably increases. From the 1460’s in
both England and France the structure of government, one might say, is
no longer in doubt: the coups d'itat in England from 1483-5 already
appear as exceptional, just as the War of the Common Weal (1465) seems
painfully anachronistic. The reason for this is in part the evolution of
government machinery.

Spain offers a singular example of these processes at work. The penin-
sula had a long tradition of divided races, divided governments and
divided languages, the expression of the divisions imposed by its moun-
tainous geography. In spite of these factors Aragon (itself a three-fold
country where Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon itself were often drawn in
contrary directions) was joined with Castile by the marriage of Ferdinand
and Isabella. Alone the marriage might not have effected a permanent
union; that it did so was partly accidental (ch. xi). But the consciously
aggressive policy of the Catholic kings also played a part : the conquest of
Granada and later the occupation of Navarre; a resolute and skilful
control over the military orders and the Church in general; a firm in-
sistence on central organs of government as against provincial cortes. In

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

both Castile and Aragon the royal councils were professionalised and
largely staffed by lawyers ; to them were added the councils of the In-
quisition, of finance, of the military orders, of the Hermandad. Such a
structure could be expanded as the need arose, as when the council of
the Indies hived off from the royal council of Castile. Local government
was provided for by viceroys, by a careful control of municipal politics
through the corregidor appointed to the council of each Castilian city
after 1480, and, in the countryside, by lending royal authority for a time
to the Hermandad.

In France and in England the Crown had embarked earlier on the
extension of its powers so that parallel developments there do not appear
so striking. Yet the late fifteenth century in both countries ushered in an
era of self-conscious royal activity which was critical. This is the period in
France (ch. x) which saw the Estates General sink finally into moribund
insignificance, when the standing army achieved coherence, when king
and ministers even went beyond the Gallican position of the Pragmatic
Sanction of Bourges (1438) in their determination to master the Church.
The hazardous policy of the appanages was triumphantly justified as they
fell in to the Crown, working concerns modelled on the royal system at
the centre, capable of rapid integration into a hierarchy of provincial
administration depending as never before on the king. Taxation was largely
a matter of royal discretion. In England administrative reforms were
also in the air, great islands of immunity and privilege were being joined
to the monarchical mainland : the northern borders are no longer a Percy
preserve; the sanctuaries crumble; and by avoiding foreign war the Crown
acquires a financial independence no less significant than that of the
French sovereigns, and one less dangerous for further constitutional
development. The English parliament, unlike the Estates General in
France, survives and grows as an instrument of royal government. As in
Spain, so in France and England the conciliar structure develops and the
royal secretaries begin to take the place of older officials of the Crown.

Events in the political evolution of Germany and Italy are usually
contrasted with those in the monarchical countries touched on above.
Italy had her Prince only in the pages of Machiavelli. With the French
invasion of Italy (ch. xu), above all with the union of Spain, the Empire,
Naples and Sicily under Charles V, the peninsula entered a period
of foreign intervention which effectively stopped any native process of
unification, and which ensured for the next 350 years the existence of
half a dozen principalities and the decaying republic of Venice. As for
Germany, the efforts at reform of the imperial constitution undertaken
in the reign of Maximilian (ch. vn) were as ineffective as those which had
been attempted by earlier emperors and as those which were to be tried
by Charles V. There was a German empire; a few tenuous institutions,
like the Reichskammergericht, were instituted; a diet survived usually as

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

the focal point of disagreement and opposition. These were factors which
kept alive a sense of German unity. But there was virtually no imperial
army, no imperial taxation, and no imperial church.

At a level below that of the national monarchy, however, the emergence
of the prince was as rapid as it was in the countries of the Atlantic sea-
board. This may be less clear in Italy, where the Papacy had an elaborate
administration but a policy which suffered a revolution after every con-
clave, and where the shadow of Habsburg and Valois lay across every
palace. But it is not obscure in Germany. There a few great houses and
a number of smaller ones were consolidating their power despite the
emperor, the towns and the knights. The Habsburgs may have been in-
effective in ruling Germany as a whole, but even Maximilian was a
respected and aggressive prince as far as his Austrian and other dynastic
domains were concerned (p. 219). In Germany notably, and to a lesser
degree elsewhere, the precepts of civil law did much to buttress the prince,
whose feudal rights and duties were now prudently reserved for his
relations with the emperor (p. 198): the king of the Romans benefited
not at all from this reception of the Roman law ; like the Italian town of
the post-glossators, the German potentate was sibi princeps.

It is customary to ascribe the absence of effective resistance to the
monarchy in France and England to the consequences of fifteenth-century
foreign and civil war. There is much truth in this. The magnates of both
countries suffered seriously in wealth and in blood: in England the Wars
of the Roses doubled the natural rate at which noble families were
extinguished. Aside from these catastrophes, however, there were at
work pressures which made the peer more amenable to the Crown than
he had been of old. Though land was still the possession most coveted by
all classes, great territorial possessions by the early sixteenth century did
not alone confer political and economic security or social prestige. Cash
and influence were both more readily secured by a courtier than a grandee
living in a remote castle, and the courts of England, France and Spain
were thronged by the greatest men in the land. Pensions, commands,
offices flowed from the king; to be near the fountain of honour put a
magnate in a favourable position for helping his clients in their ambitions,
in return for their support, material and moral. In France and Spain
nobility conferred immunity to taxation and the doctrine was encouraged
which justified the gentleman’s fiscal privilege by his military service.
And in gravitating to the royal army the noblesse de I'eped were still further
strengthening the hands of the king and thus indirectly lightening the
bonds of other classes in society.

The prevailing trend to monarchial absolutism which distinguished wes-
tern Europe at this time is far from being characteristic of eastern Europe
(ch. xm). The internal politics of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia are the
very opposite of monarchical. In each country the sovereign was more or

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

less in a state of subservience to the nobles — a numerous class in both
Poland and Hungary, and one in which the minor nobles found it possible
to consolidate their position. Even in Bohemia, ‘in all but name, an
aristocratic republic’ (p. 390), the knightly class made an effort to share
power with the few great families who formed an hereditary and superior
caste. Though not legally separated from the lesser nobles, the great
magnates of both Poland and Hungary formed the dominating cliques
which strove to exploit the dwindling resources of the Crown. In all these
countries a depression in the status of towns and peasantry is very marked,
and again contrasts with western developments.

Two countries on the eastern perimeter of Europe were, in their very
different ways, more akin in political tone to the West than the states
just mentioned. Russia was emerging as a state in which the princes of
Moscow were to endure no rivals (pp. 368-70). And on the ruins of Byzan-
tium the Ottoman Turks (ch. xiv) were developing an autocracy, which
(like the Russian) owed a good deal to the example of the expropriated
empire of East Rome. Many a western prince must have envied a ruler
who was legally empowered to execute his rivals at his accession (p. 396).

In two areas of the West the pattern of strong government was absent
or less evident: Switzerland and the Low Countries. The Swiss at this
period were at the apogee of their brief military supremacy. Regarded
with distaste by gentlemen who disliked their tactics while learning from
them, and by humanists who looked upon them as the very essence of all
the worst vices — bloodthirstiness, covetousness and barbarism, the Swiss
were not yet aware of the uniqueness of their political institutions. As for
the Low Countries (ch. vui), where within a century a second republic was
to emerge, the ghost of the Burgundian State, with its confused traditions
of regionalism and centralisation, its growing oligarchy and the shift in
economic importance from Flanders northwards to Holland, also con-
cealed the importance of those constitutional checks on the prince which
were to be significant in the future. Republicanism had, in fact, a slender
enough basis in theory in a Europe where only in Italy was there any
awareness of its political justification. And even in Italy the romantic and
futile gestures in this direction (p. 97) were inspired rather by literature
than by an active interest in political reform. Only Venice was to survive
in the end as an independent republic, and the Venetian oligarchy of
‘noblemen’ offered no programme to the bourgeoisie of the North.

Kings had become masters of their kingdoms. As a result, dynasticism
determined the pattern of international relations. In a sense this was not
new, for the feudal king had furthered his interests in the main by
marriage: the Angevin ‘empire’ was an accidental product of this; the
interlocking princely families of Scandinavia and East Europe, the Luxem-
burg emperors, the kings of Castile, Aragon and Portugal all provide

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

many medieval examples. But in France and England royal marriages
were normally not calculated to produce major political changes, at any
rate before the marriage of Henry V and Catherine in 1420: it was rather
the magnates who followed this line as a means of advancement — the
Angevins in Naples, Orleans in Milan, Gaunt in Spain and Gloucester in
Hainault. The carefully contrived Habsburg alliances changed all this.
In so far as one can plan anything which depends on the hazards of
heredity, one can say that the empire of Charles V was deliberately
created: it was the result of one of those double marriages (Philip to
Juana, Margaret of Austria to the Infante, 1496-7) which distinguished
the house of Habsburg (p. 341). By the end of the period with which this
volume deals, Maximilian’s grandson was ruler of the Netherlands,
Spain, Germany, part of Italy, and part of the New World. Soon Valois
and Habsburgs were seeking further marriages to consolidate their rival
positions and the whole network of sixteenth-century diplomacy was to
turn on the results. While these relationships dominated European politics,
others, different in scale but not in kind, were produced by the marriage
of Margaret Tudor to King James IV of Scotland (1503).

This is all well-known. It gave scope for the development of those
instruments of international political contacts— ever-growing diplomatic
machinery, armies which were increasingly professional— which are so
pronounced a feature of sixteenth-century history. The ambassador is still
often a prince or prelate specially sent to seek an alliance or conclude a
treaty; but the shabbier residents grow more numerous, and the volume
of diplomatic despatches which survives from the fifteenth century is very
large (ch. ix). Italian experience set the pace in the evolution of diplo-
matic technique. And it is only in Italy that we meet the professional
general before the sixteenth century. Thereafter the armies of the Powers,
increasingly composed of infantry not cavalry, and with artillery becoming
more important, were entrusted to experts whenever possible.

Although the reality of politics was princely aggrandisement, the ruins
of Christendom can be descried behind the rising walls of Europe. The
Crusade was dead but its name and some of its magic lived on. Until
1492, when Granada fell, the crusade had some meaning in Spain; defence
against the Ottoman Turk was equally a genuine problem in the Balkans
and East Europe. But in the West the invocation of a ‘crusade’ was only
a preliminary to more immediate depredation. From the pope down-
wards, Christian kings were prepared to come to terms — at any rate over
short term issues — with the infidel. Most statesmen must in their hearts
have accepted as properly detached, Commynes’s approving references to
the ‘ saige et vaillant ’ Mehemmed II. 1 Though Christians affected to be
shocked, there was nothing inherently surprising in the acceptance by
Innocent VIII of a pension from the sultan in 1490 (p. 78).

1 Memoires, ed. Calmette, vol. 11, p. 337.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

Chief symbol of the rise of Christendom, the pope was now a symbol
of its decline. The panoply of universal monarchy hung awkwardly on
the shoulders of Alexander VI and Julius II. Their policies were princely,
not to say dynastic, and limited to Italy. This kind of behaviour in a pope
roused contempt and indignation in northern Europe. Erasmus’s Julius
Exclusus (1513), directed specifically at Julius II, held its accusing finger
at all popes of the time: ‘nunc regnum est ac tyrannis’. 1 For this state of
affairs the character of individual popes was in part responsible. But
even more was due to processes which were divorcing the Papacy from
the Church, compelling popes to become princelings. These processes
were all intimately interconnected, but for convenience they may be
considered under three heads : the internal disintegration of the Church,
the rise of national churches, and the pressure by the laity on the landed
endowments of the clergy.

By the internal disintegration of the Church is meant the decline in
uniformity of obedience which characterises the fifteenth century. For
this the schism of 1378 was only partly responsible, though the effects of
that were grave. The existence of rival hierarchies split the international
religious orders, which were already showing fissiparous tendencies. The
credit of the cardinals, who had caused the schism, was permanently
lowered, for far from mending their position at Pisa and Constance, they
recreated a Papacy determined at all costs to prevent them ever again
assuming power. Above all, as a result of the schism and its aftermath
the popes of the fifteenth century were terrified of councils. At Constance
decrees, which, to all appearances, received a papal confirmation, laid
down both the supremacy of general councils and the machinery by which
they were to be summoned every ten years. It became the consistent
policy of Eugenius IV (who had to endure the Council of Basle) and his
successors both to prevent the actual summoning of councils and posi-
tively to affirm that the doctrine of conciliar supremacy was anathema.
The Lateran Council of 1512 was held solely to counteract the French-
sponsored ‘conciliabulum’ of Pisa (ch. iv).

This refusal to hold a general council, in which the reform of the Church
could be undertaken, resulted in the further development of heresy, near-
heresy and indifference. It may be suspected that the problem of real
heresy was the least important. Heresy had been endemic in parts of
western Europe from the twelfth century, but the Church had at least
contained it, where it had not wiped it out altogether. The heresies of the
fourteenth century met a similar fate: the Lollards were (after 1417)
restricted to a handful of uninfluential Englishmen ; the Hussites, though
important in Bohemia, were no threat to Christendom generally. The
popular mysticism which coloured so much trans-Alpine thought in the
fifteenth century was a far more insidious danger to religious uniformity.

1 Opuscula, ed. Ferguson, p. 83.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Groups of mystical associates, beghards and beguines, were particularly
numerous in western Germany and the Low Countries; sometimes they
were encouraged by the local ordinary, sometimes they were persecuted.
The laity who more and more took the lead in such associations were
largely urban, and shared that traditional hostility to the religious to
which literary sources are a regular witness, from the Decameron and the
Canterbury Tales to the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Colloquies
of Erasmus. The more serious critics, from Gerson onwards, com-
bined personal devotion with a contempt for much of organised religion
which gave a lead to those anxious to make trouble for monks and
friars. To this kind of criticism only an impeccable and industrious
Papacy could have answered. The popes after Pius II stimulated suspi-
cions which could only be dispelled by conciliar methods they would not
countenance.

The emergence of national churches was naturally encouraged by the
weakness of the Papacy. Even before the fourteenth century princes had
been disinclined to allow the Church the liberties it demanded. Prelates
were royal nominees wherever and whenever kings were powerful. In
the later Middle Ages some control over the Church in their dominions
passed even to relatively minor rulers, while the greater sovereigns of
Europe pursued ecclesiastical policies which enabled them to become
masters of their clergy. The history of the English kings’ truculent attitude
to the clergy during the whole course of the fourteenth century is familiar:
it was justified then by the Papacy being at Avignon, but it continued in
even more marked fashion after the schism ended in 1417. The concordat
of the English nation with the Papacy after Constance was a formal
document, the real basis of royal power being the statutes of Provisors
and Praemunire as re-enacted by Richard II’s government. In France the
concordat was a genuine reflection of a monarchy asserting its control
over the Church. The adoption by the French clergy of the anti-papal
legislation of the Council of Basle (Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, 1438)
was merely the first explicit formulation of regalian as against papal
rights over the French Church. Later kings were able to modify it; and
Louis XII in particular had to temporise for a while (p. 302) ; but whatever
the outward promises of the king to the pope may have been, his practical
mastery over the Church was not in doubt. The most remarkable example
of royal power in the ecclesiastical field was, of course, the Inquisition in
Spain (1478) which put at the disposal, not of the Church but of the
Crown, an instrument which was both efficient as a control over opinion
and as a promoter of unification, and also highly profitable (p. 336).

Nowhere were these developments more congenial than in Germany.
There a prolonged hatred of popes was a sentiment that occasionally
could even bind the emperors and the princes together. The Germans,
both lay and ecclesiastical rulers, were naturally amongst the warmest

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

supporters of the conciliar reform programme, which promised them the
greatest possible independence in ecclesiastical matters. Here (as in the
case of the reception of Roman law) the conciliarism of the Germans
redounded to the advantage of the prince, not the emperor. As many of
the German prelates were also temporal rulers (p. 195), their attitude is
hardly to be distinguished from that of the secular princes, to whom they
were frequently related ; indeed, the bishops had even more to gain than
the lay lords from a reduction in papal power.

On the basis of a church locally controlled by the prince ecclesiastical
politics were naturally often conducted provincially with a cynical am-
bition truly papal in extent. The career of Cardinal d’ Amboise, which is told
elsewhere in this volume (pp. 302-3) is significant. It was logical that his
plunder of the Church should lead on to his desire to become pope and to
his being given the consolation of a legatine commission: Wolsey’s story
in the next generation was to be not dissimilar. Equally significant of the
future was Maximilian’s naive plan to occupy the throne of St Peter in 1 5 1 1 ,
during the illness of Julius II (p. 215). It was, indeed, bizarre, but had it
been conceived on a national level it would have merely anticipated
Henry VIII’s action when he became ‘ Supreme Head on Earth ’.

The aspect of papal policy which most disturbed the trans-Alpine
Christian was financial. That hardly any money was going to the Curia
from England, and not much from other non-Italian provinces of the
Church, was beside the point; indulgences were growing in importance
if more regular sources of revenue were in decline (p. 87); and any pay-
ment at all roused passions which were deep and found in all branches of
society. Papal ‘fiscality’ was unendurable because of the wealth of the
Church and the desire of the laity to recover, or at any rate share in, the
enjoyment of the vast endowments which lay in mortmain. Legislation
against mortmain is found practically everywhere in the later Middle Ages.
And so are devices by which the laity participated in the landed wealth
of the Church: stewardships, wardenships, corrodies, pensions of all
kinds were awarded to the laity by the possessioners. Even more sig-
nificant was the extensive use in certain areas of grants in commendam to
persons who were not in any true sense religious, and the promotion to
high ecclesiastical office of the children of great men. In Scotland the
illegitimate progeny of the Stewarts occupied archbishoprics, bishoprics
and abbeys: sometimes papal compliance impressed even the royal
impetrant, as when James IV himself described as ‘ a hard matter scarcely
to be hoped for’ the successful promotion of his eleven year old illegiti-
mate son Alexander to the archbishopric of St Andrews in 1504. 1 Under
the successors of James IV the spoliation of the Scottish Church by
the royal family and the magnates continued unabated, and when the

1 Letters of James IV 1503-13, ed. R. K. Hannay, R. L. Mackie A. Spilman (Scot.
Hist. Soc. 1953), p. xxxvi.

4 13 HCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Reformation came to Scotland there was no need formally to dissolve the
monasteries : there were in practice no monasteries left to dissolve.

The confiscation of church lands in Scotland was the work of king and
pope acting in collusion. In Italy it was no less thorough and no less
‘legal’, though it was accomplished in a different way. The astonishing
conveyance of lands from clergy to laity in northern Italy was a long
process. 1 The clergy there were cruelly taxed — by pope, towns and tyrants;
they were further impoverished by commendation; they were ill-placed
to take advantage of the opportunities of improving their estates; the
rapid devaluation of the currency after 1300 put them in an even worse
position. When these pressures began to be obtrusive a great deal of land
was already leased out, much of it at a low rent to creditors, potentes,
relatives of the abbot, who were able to sublet at an advantageous rate.
In the mid-fifteenth century the ‘ pillage of ecclesiastical property went to
unheard-of lengths’; profits of sub-letting now ran as high as 700 per cent
and were far more certain as well as larger than the profits of trade.
Leases of this kind (fictalicia) were for a fixed period ; but the Church had
to reimburse the tenant for improvements effected during the tenancy or
else renew on the same disadvantageous terms ( eodem ficto ); as the
Church could not in practice compensate the tenant, the second alternative
was adopted so that, though on paper still a vast landed proprietor, the
Church drew no profits from her estates. The final stage came when the
favoured tenant ( fictabilis ) was allowed, first of all a perpetual lease at a
higher rent, and then the right of enjoying the estate pleno iure if he
provided in exchange the equivalent value, not extent, of land. Hence
great estates, which the impoverished Church could not maintain in
good condition, passed into lay hands in return for small ones. The new
style of architecture and ecclesiastical decoration which became de rigueur
as the fifteenth century progressed has left many monuments of lasting
value, but it is no indication of the wealth of the Church, for it was often
financed by selling lands and by neglecting the upkeep of the remaining
property.* In northern Italy by the mid-sixteenth century the Church was
proprietor of only 10 per cent or 15 per cent of the land, compared with a
holding in the south of 65 per cent or 70 per cent. At least one motive
for a reformation of the Church was thus largely absent in Italy.

The period covered by this volume saw the first real contacts between
the Renaissance in Italy and the northern world (chs. in, v, vi). The delay
in the effective diffusion of the attitudes associated with Italian thought
from Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni is a matter which has properly received
much attention in recent years. Where so much in the north seems dis-

1 C. M. Cipolla, ‘Comment s’est perdue la propri6t£ ecclesiastique dans l’ltalie du Nord
entre le XI et le XVI stecle’, Annales, 11 (Paris, 1947), 317-27.

1 Cipolla, p. 323 n.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

posed to a reception of humanism — the bourgeois values of the Low
Countries, the progress to realism in much of northern art, a hostility
among some mystics to the pedantries of the schoolmen — it seems odd
that there is no humanism to speak of in fifteenth-century England (p. 55),
hardly any in France and in Germany little till the end of the century.
What the north for long saw in the trecento and quattrocento was only
the integument of humanism, not its spirit : a fondness for Latinising and
for classical motifs, not an understanding of the moral values of antiquity
which had inspired the main humanists in the peninsula. There were,
however, good reasons for this slowness in apprehending the Italian
world.

At the material level, Italy had a wealth which was great by comparison
with the north and which was predominantly urban. An interest in art,
literature and moral philosophy needs ample resources to develop and
in northern Europe these were tied up more closely than in Italy with a
conservative Church ; theology dominated the universities of France, Eng-
land and Germany, but was practically absent in the universities of Italy.
There had always been a homogeneity about Tuscan and Lombard
society which contrasted with the feudal North : the magnates were town-
dwellers and, despite Guelf and Ghibelline political traditions, the grandi
lived the same life as the grassi; even the tyrants of the fourteenth century
were urban in origin, and shared to a great extent the values of their
subjects. In taste and inclination the Italian prince was very different
from the ruler of the north; equally the republics of Italy were different
from the Flemish or German towns.

Nevertheless the humanist in Italy must not be regarded as an immutable
type reflecting a unified society. One difficulty in seizing on Italian values
was that they were by no means consistent: the humanist could speak
with several voices. Petrarch had been essentially a product of an exile
from Florence spent in the courts of the northern tyrants: his attitude to
letters was one of detachment. Only in an otium provided most easily by
a princely patron could the man of letters fulfil his appointed task. This
attitude could have its political complications, for the disciples of Pet-
rarch at Milan argued that Italy itself was only to be saved by the inter-
vention of their Visconti master. At Florence republicanism gradually
emerged, very much as the result of the threat of Giangaleazzo Visconti,
so it has been argued. 1 Whatever its causes, the attitude of Bruni was
diametrically opposed to that of Petrarch on other issues besides that of
republicanism. For Bruni rejected Petrarch’s whole attitude to the active
life, accepted Cicero’s political activity as a fulfilment, not a negation, of
his moral teaching, and regarded Dante — head of a family and politician

1 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955). See
the bibliographical references in vol. n and especially Dr Baron’s other writings in History,
Speculum, and Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, all for 1938.

15 *'*

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

as well as poet and philosopher — as an ideal citizen. Soon the Florentine
circle of humanists was to take the even more surprising step of challen-
ging the condemnation of wealth and establishing the doctrine that
poverty was not the only way of appearing virtuous in the eyes of God.
We may choose to regard these developments as characteristic of the
Renaissance in Italy, because they are sympathetic to our own outlook.
But they never lacked critics in Italy at the time. There was, for example,
always a princely tradition as well as a republican one : because Michel-
angelo idealised Brutus when Dante had put him in the nethermost pit,
we should not therefore assume that Caesar had no devotees. Indeed, the
Italian who reflected on the political needs of his country was forced into
the uncomfortable position of advocating what seem contradictory poli-
cies : Machiavelli is a republican and an advocate of strong monarchy at
the same time, a republican for Florence, and for Italy an impassioned
defender of the Prince.

By the time of Machiavelli we thus have some sort of junction in the
opposing traditions in Italian political thought. Such an amalgamation
took place in Italian thought in general in the late fifteenth century. It
entered, as we read below (p. 69), upon a religious phase in the late
fifteenth century, when Platonic and neo-Platonic ideas began to attract
attention. Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola tried to find a
synthesis, far broader than earlier Italian humanism had been capable of,
for aspirations towards that ‘wisdom’ which had often in earlier days
been lost sight of in ‘eloquence’. That Pico did not even try to meet the
demands of contemporary good Latin style indicates how far this syn-
cretism was taken, and puts latter-day humanism into as contradictory a
position (viewed in the light of previous scholarship in Italy) as that
found in Machiavelli. Such a religious preoccupation was, it must be
added, not solely found in the Florentine circle. The humanist was not a
pagan : nor was the Italian artist. We read elsewhere in this book (p. 1 35)
that there is truth in the Michelet-Burckhardt ‘ thesis of the “ discovery of
man” in the age of the Renaissance, but it is man conscious of his
individual role in the great plan of redemption’; in its theological im-
plications Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine chapel is of ‘unequalled
profundity’ (p. 139).

Looked at merely from the viewpoint of patronage, a stage had again
been reached in Italy where contrary tendencies were drawing together.
The earlier patrons of literature and the arts demanded works diverse in
range and even opposed in spirit ; the court of the Visconti, the merchants
of Florence, the friars of Assisi had very different tastes. The late fifteenth
century saw Medici influence dominant in Florence, and soon it was to
be dominant also in Rome and in the Church. The courts of Italy, small
ones like Montefeltro Urbino, and the largest one of all in Leonine Rome,
talked a common language, the ‘illustrious Italian’, and patronised the

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

same craftsmen and scholars in much the same mood: an ‘inter-Italian
medium’ in architecture (p. 131) and Ciceronianism in scholarship are
signs of the new uniformity.

Northern Europe meanwhile had acquired time to expand and to
experiment. The early fifteenth century had been a period when lavish
patronage had hardly been possible in England, France or Spain: the
duke of Gloucester and the duke of Berri are far more important as
patrons than their kings ; but the only northern magnates who really had
time and money for the graces of life were the dukes of Burgundy, so
long as they could trim economically between the English and the French.
By the end of the century, however, England and Spain were under
centralising monarchies anxious to impress the outside world, and France
was engaged on that invasion of Italy which was to produce, in the
cultural field, an occupation of France by the ideas and attitudes of Italy.
The adoption of much that Italy had to offer was easier than it had been :
the concentration of Italian civilisation in an atmosphere of princes and
their courts made it easy for northern princes and northern courts to
assimilate what had earlier proved inaccessible. The humanist became a
necessity to northern kings; Latin secretaries were needed for foreign
correspondence; men capable of rhetorical Latin were needed for em-
bassies; the humanist historian could put his country’s case before the
international world in what Camden, almost a century later, was still to
call the ‘universal language’. Called from Urbino or Rome, the Italian
artist or writer was more completely at home in England or France than
he had been two generations earlier. The northern scholar or painter who
visited the peninsula — and for both this was becoming a regular part of
their training (p. 155) — moved in an atmosphere not greatly different
from what he was used to at home.

Nowhere at first was the response to Italian values more rapid than in
Germany (p. 68). This was somewhat paradoxical, for there hostility to
the Roman Church was strong and most of the country had an even
slenderer historical connection with Rome than Gaul, Britain or Spain.
Yet there were good reasons for it. The German vernacular presented
more difficulties for the writer than French or English, and all the attrac-
tions of humanist Latin, all the optimistic hopes of Italian educational
programmes, were correspondingly enhanced. Besides, the German king
had a traditional connection with the regnum Italicum ; the reality of this
was dead, but it had a certain sentimental value, and Italian humanists of
the first rank, like Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, had taken service for a
time in Germany. More important perhaps were the interest of Germans
in the civil law, which took them to Bologna; the receptivity to new ideas
of the new universities ; and the commercial relations of south Germany
with urban Italy : in Augsburg the burgesses were to be early patrons of
the new style in art (p. 156). Above all, the German humanist cultivated

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

his past antiquities in the new Italianate manner and found, of course,
much in Tacitus’ Germania to give his interest in the classics something
of the patriotism which inspired Italian students. Maximilian actively
promoted these developments. Their best monument is Ulrich von Hutten’s
brief dialogue Arminius, in which the primacy of the German hero over
Alexander, Scipio, and Hannibal is asserted.

There were, however, aspects of the northern movement which are not
in any profound sense Italian or humanist (p. 64). From the most
significant of these derives the attraction exerted in certain quarters by
the ‘religious’ thought of late-fifteenth-century Italy. That this appealed
in different ways to Colet and Lefevre d’Etaples is not sufficient to make
the latter ‘humanists’ if the word is to be taken as meaning something
more than merely a synonym for scholar or man of devotion. Our study
of these men is clouded by the Reformation which so soon swamped their
particular kind of evangelism. We lack adequate biographies even, let
alone complete evaluations of their place in the world of ideas. It is,
however, abundantly clear that Colet was ‘an ascetic reformer of the type
of John Standonck and the Brothers of the Common Life, he was an
educator of importance, he was profoundly Christian; but he was not a
humanist’. Erasmus’s biographical letter to Jodocus Badius has misled
generations of critics. In fact Colet was utterly opposed to the kind of
docta pietas of the contemporary humanist, and the Augustinian sapientia
he revered excluded not only the contemptible logic of the schools, but
also the philosophers and the poets. 1 If this is humanism, then Thomas a
Kempis also must be enrolled among the humanists.

Erasmus’s position in relation to northern mysticism and evangelism
and to Italian humanism is central in all senses. More than any other
scholar he displays characteristics from both camps: like Holbein, who
made such fine portraits of him, his work has elements in it which are
Gothic and others which are Italian (p. 155). He represents all the opti-
mism of the southern tradition, its conviction that letters were the noblest
expression of a noble mind, its relish for eloquence. At the same time he
is desperately concerned with the reality of religion and the need to strip
it of all that can distract and confuse the devout. The revival of letters was
for him one aspect of the revival of Christianity ; the republic of letters a
facet of the respublica Christiana ; scholarship led to God. Nothing is more
instructive than the publication by Erasmus in 1505 of the Adnotationes
in Novum Testamentum of Lorenzo Valla. Valla, an enigmatic figure
certainly, but surely not an active Christian, had been preoccupied with
philology: for Erasmus the work was the prolegomena to a ‘Biblical
Humanism’ where philology was a servant, not a master (p. 115). This
approach, which owes as much to the nova devotio as it does to the revival

1 See the important article by Eugene F. Rice, Jr., ‘John Colet and the annihilation of
the natural’, Harvard Theological Review, xlv (1952), pp. 141-63.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTRODUCTION

of letters, is sometimes to be discerned only with difficulty, for Erasmus
was also a writer, and his meanness, suspicion, cantankerousness are
often obtrusive, while his impulse to satire was often indulged in almost
for its own sake.

The Erasmus of the period covered by this volume could sting and tease
without qualms. The first twenty years of the sixteenth century is the
halcyon period of the northern Renaissance. Thereafter Luther and the
Roman Church could legitimately demand of Erasmus a plain yes or no.
His attempt to continue his via media after the Lutheran schism brings
into clear relief that doctrine of the ‘ philosophy of Christ ’ which was not
philosophy or theology as they were understood by his contemporaries:
a concept which not only offended the reformers, but which ‘could satisfy
neither Thomist rationalism, the fideism of Ockham, nor the intuitionism
of the mystics, and which was rejected by rationalists, fideists and mystics
at the Council of Trent’. 1 1520 was, in fact, a key year. 2 The papal bull
Exsurge, Domine of June was a terrible blow to good letters as Erasmus
saw them and to the policy of conciliation he advocated : in December
Luther burnt the bull and this destroyed all chance of reason prevailing.
Dogma was thereafter the order of the day in both camps and the un-
dogmatic approach of Erasmus was condemned to isolation. The Renais-
sance made way for the Reformation.

1 A. Renaudet, £rasme, sa pensee religieuse et son action. . .1318-21 (Biblioth&que de la
Revue Historique, Paris, 1926), p. II.

s Ibid. pp. 87-103.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER II

THE FACE OF EUROPE ON THE EVE OF
THE GREAT DISCOVERIES

‘ ~r f we would study with profit the history of our ancestors, we. . .must

I never forget that the country of which we read was a very different
A country from that in which we live. ’ Lord Macaulay’s dictum is cer-
tainly true of Europe on the eve of the Great Discoveries. Could the
landscapes of that time be set before our eyes, we should find them very
different from those of today. The countryside, although tamed by the
pioneering activity of the Middle Ages, would still look wild to our eyes
— or much of it would. If the great forests had been reduced, much of
the marsh and heath still remained untouched. The medieval city had
risen to prominence, yet most of the towns and cities would appear small
to us, and their industrial and commercial activities limited.

But although much has changed, the bold facts of physical geography
have remained much the same. Europe is a peninsula of peninsulas; and
on either side of the great peninsula itself lie, and lay, the two maritime
worlds of the Mediterranean and of northern and western Europe, with
their contrasting histories and climates and commodities. Towards the
broad base of the peninsula, where it is attached to Asia, Europe loses
its identity. Vast plains replace the variety of mountain and lowland, and
the temperatures on these plains fall below freezing point for most of the
winter.

But the human geography of Europe in the fifteenth century must be
considered not only against the variety of its physical setting, but also in
the framework of its time. One of the most notable achievements of the
Middle Ages was the clearing and reclamation and draining by which the
countryside was tamed and transformed. But this great expansive move-
ment did not continue uninterruptedly right up to the dawn of modern
times. In places it slowed down; in some places it ceased; in yet other
places the frontiers of cultivation even retreated. Certainly over most of
the Continent, agricultural effort had passed its maximum by 1300, and
the great age of expanding arable was succeeded, in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, by one of stagnation and contraction. During the
hundred years between 1350 and 1450 the decline was especially marked.
What was true of agriculture was true of trade and mining and industry.
It was also true of town growth, although local fortunes complicated the
general picture. The causes for this recession are involved and obscure,
and among the agencies invoked to explain it are the destruction of war,
great pestilences, falling prices and a basic decline in population. Towards

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

the end of the century there are signs of a recovery which was to lead on
to the new prosperity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is
against this background of space and time that first the countrysides and
then the cities of Europe must be considered.

In the east, the triple division into coniferous forest, deciduous forest
and steppe reflected itself in ways of living. The deciduous area was the
home of the Muscovite State. Clearings in the land drained by the Oka,
the upper Volga and their tributaries provided an agricultural base for
the early principality of Muscovy, and gave it some advantage over the
other principalities of the deciduous lands; rye was the main crop, but
barley, oats and some wheat were also grown. From this centre, consoli-
dated by Ivan the Great (1462-1505), expansion to the north and south
was to create the Russian State of modern times.

Northwards to the White Sea stretched the coniferous forest, sparsely
peopled by Finnish and Lapp tribes, and providing a reservoir of fur —
sable, marten, fox and, of lesser value, beaver, squirrel and otter. Fur
led the traders northward and eastward along the great rivers, linked one
to another by portages. Along the White Sea shores, and elsewhere, salt
making was important ; so were fishing, sealing and whaling. Agriculture
was subsidiary, except possibly along the upper courses of the Dvina
River. The trade of the area drained to Novgorod near the Baltic coast, a
Hanse centre and a market of high renown. Into the northern region
had come not only merchants but missionaries. Between 1340 and 1440
there had been a great development of monasticism, and the monks had
sought the untamed wilderness. Byelozero (founded in 1397) and Solo-
vetsky (founded in 1436) became important economic as well as cultural
centres. There were also other towns to the north of Moscow, e.g. Yaro-
slavl, Vologda, Rostov and Troitsa. All these were to gain a new importance
with the opening of the White Sea route to the west by Elizabethan
adventurers in 1553. By this time the subjection of Novgorod by Ivan the
Great in 1478 had brought her rough trading empire within the sphere of
Muscovy, and the new gains of the sixteenth century were to fall to
Moscow.

Southwards from Moscow lay the steppes. By the fifteenth century their
role as a passage-way from Asia was over. The last great nomadic horde
to ride across them was that of the Tartars in the thirteenth century, and
for over two centuries the Golden Horde of Kipchak were the over-
lords of their Russian neighbours to the north. But by the fifteenth
century dissensions had weakened the Horde, and in 1480 Ivan refused
to pay tribute. The way was now open for the colonists of his suc-
cessors to advance out of the forest into those steppelands described by
Gogol as ‘a green-yellow ocean, besprinkled with millions of spring
flowers’.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The latter years of the fifteenth century, with the subjugation of Nov-
gorod in 1478 and the repulse of the Golden Horde in 1480, marked the
end of a chapter and the beginning of modern Russia. It was, in the
eighteenth century, for Peter the Great to carry its frontiers to the Baltic
and for Catherine the Great to bring them to the Black Sea.

Across the Baltic Sea lay Scandinavia. By the eleventh century its
political geography had taken the form it retained right through the
Middle Ages. The territory of Denmark stretched across the entrance to
the Baltic; it included not only the peninsula of Jutland but the more
fertile islands of Ftinen and Zealand and a strip of what is now Sweden.
Here, off the coasts of Skania, were some of the richest fishing grounds
in Europe. Fishing, especially for the herring, was important in all the
northern waters. Beyond Skania, to the north of the barren upland
of Smaland, lay the centre of the Swedish kingdom — in the lowland
that runs south-westward from Stockholm around the lakes of Wener
and Wetter; here, tillage and stock raising were important on land cleared
of its wood. Northwards stretched the great forests of Norrland, sparsely
inhabited. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Sweden had occupied
Finland, and to this day Swedish speech persists along parts of the coast,
a memorial of that period of colonisation. To the west, Norway faced
the Atlantic and the North Sea; the greater part of its mountainous
surface was not suitable for agriculture or for permanent settlement.

We are fortunate in having a remarkable picture of these Scandinavian
lands in the map that was produced in 1539 by Olaus Magnus. 1 This map,
richly embellished by many small sketches, gives us some of the main
facts about the contemporary geography. The great forests are indicated,
and also the various fur-bearing animals of northern Sweden and Finland ;
the limits of winter ice in the Baltic Sea and in the inland lakes are marked ;
the rich mines of Kopparberg and elsewhere in the broad lake-filled plain
of Sweden are indicated, and separate symbols show iron, copper, silver
and gold. Some of the sketches illustrate incidents in the daily life both
on land and at sea. The map extends south to include the Baltic coasts of
the German realm to which we must now turn.

The Russian plain continued into that of northern Germany across the
Pripet Marshes that covered a substantial area nearly one-half the size of
England. These enormous swamps, traversed by an intricate network of
streams and relieved by sandy islets, were to remain in their amphibious
condition until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This countryside
is usually regarded as the homeland of the Slav peoples, whence they
spread east and south and west to cover such an immense tract of Europe.
They moved westward across the Vistula and the Oder into the lands
abandoned by the Teutonic peoples who had entered the Roman Empire.

1 Edward Lynam, The Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus, Venice 1539 & Rome 1372 (Tall
Tree Library, Jenkintown, Pa., U.S.A., 1949).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

By a.d. 600 the line of the Elbe-Saale had become the frontier between
the German and Slav worlds, but this frontier was not to last, for, between
900 and 1250, the Germans recovered much of this territory. The German
advance eastward took place under the impetus of economic and mission-
ary motives, and there arose a contrast between the new east colonial
Germany and the old west feudal Germany. Analogy has been drawn
between this advance and the expansion of the American people westward
from the Atlantic seaboard. What the new west meant to Young America
in the nineteenth century, that the new east had meant to Medieval
Germany. Although historical analogies are often misleading, this com-
parison does emphasise the colonial character of much of Germany during
and towards the end of the Middle Ages.

The surface of the German plain is covered, almost everywhere, with
deposits brought by the great ice-sheets which spread out from Scandi-
navia in Quaternary times. Much of the clay is hummocky and on its
ill-drained surface lay marsh and shadow lakes of curious shape; many of
the river valleys were also marshy. Elsewhere, stretches of infertile sand
and gravel, derived from the glacial deposits, form a type of country
known as ‘Geest’. The landscape that confronted the German settlers
was one of wood and marsh and heath. The wood, or most of it, fell
before the axe of the pioneers. Place-names that end in wald and holz
indicate the former character of the countryside, and those ending in
rode , schwend and hagen bear witness to the activity of the pioneers. They
came from the older parts of Germany, ‘with horses and oxen, with
ploughs and wagons’ to transform the countrysides of what are now
Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania and Silesia. They were accom-
panied and followed by Dutch, Flemish and Frisian colonists who em-
banked streams and drained marshes. Between the Elbe and the Oder
they transformed the inland marshes into productive countrysides along
the Mark of Brandenburg. Into the dry soils of parts of the Geest they
cut irrigation canals, and they gave their name to the district of Flaming
that lies to the east of Magdeburg. The changes were urban as well as
rural. The dates of the founding of the cities of north Germany mark the
success of the advance. Behind the achievement of the Hanseatic cities
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lay a background of some cen-
turies of colonial effort.

By the end of the thirteenth century the advance had spent itself
Poland was penetrated by German colonists and civilisation, but only to
a limited degree. Yet in two outlying eastern areas German missionary
zeal and colonising impulse had found fruitful fields of activity. Early in
the thirteenth century the Military Order of the Brethren of the Sword
had planted the country around the Gulf of Riga with German fortified
towns, and to this the German Balts mainly owed their origin. Later in
the century, between this northern outpost and the homeland, a second

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Military Order, the Teutonic Knights, more thoroughly occupied the
land. The consequences were fateful for the affairs of Europe because this
new sphere of German colonisation, later known as East Prussia, was
separated from the main body of German settlement by what was to be-
come known as the Polish Corridor.

The total result of this eastward expansion was that the main outlines
of the frontier between German and Slav had been drawn before the
end of the Middle Ages. The countryside of the north German plain had
also been transformed. But we must not endow this countryside with a
prosperity it did not possess in the fifteenth century. In places, it was only
with assiduous labour that the sands could be made to yield their crops of
rye and oats, and the improvement of great stretches of Geest had to wait
for the scientific agriculture of a later age. Much of the land, too, remained
in its boggy condition for many centuries. Even the modem map shows
large numbers of shallow lakes in Mecklenburg and Pomerania.

While the eastward march was in progress, colonists also achieved a
more intensive use of land in the older settled districts. Woods were
cleared and wasted lands were once more reoccupied. In Germany, be-
tween the Rhine and the Elbe, daughter houses of the great Rhineland
monasteries contributed much to transforming the countryside of Thurin-
gia and Saxony into arable and pasture. Similar work was accomplished
elsewhere. New fields were carved out to lie alongside those already
cultivated, and, where soil and aspect were suitable, the newly cleared
lands were planted with vines. The opportunity and success of cultivation
varied from region to region. They were at their highest along the northern
edge of the central highlands. Here lies a belt of gently sloping fertile
country with a characteristic covering of ‘loess’ or ‘limon’, easily worked
and fertile. The belt, it is true, is of varying width and is broken by em-
bayments from the plain. The Borde and Hellweg regions of Germany
stretch from Magdeburg to Westphalia, and their characteristics are
prolonged across the Rhine into the low uplands of Hesbaye, Brabant and
Hainault. Limon also covers great terraces in the Rhine valley. These loess
or limon lands are the most tractable to the plough in Europe, and the
effort of the Middle Ages left them closely settled and well cultivated.
On the other hand, attempts to improve the hungry sands, that cover
much of this older settled region, had only limited results. The Liineburg
Heath, the Geest of Hanover, and the Kempenland defeated the efforts
of medieval colonists to bring them satisfactorily into cultivation. In later
centuries, as at the close of the Middle Ages, they stood out as empty and
neglected areas ; some wealth was brought to the area by the salt springs
around Liineburg.

Along the shores of the North Sea there was loss and gain, and perhaps
more loss than gain. Between 1377 and 1421, in the Low Countries, the
sea had swallowed up many townships and increased the size of the

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Zuider Zee; the Bay of Jade had also been enlarged by storms. But lords
and abbeys and peasants had formed themselves into associations for
dyking and draining ( wateringen ), and under the shelter of their dykes
fertile polders were coming into being from Flanders to Frisia. The inun-
dated and marshy lands of Schleswig and Holstein, too, were rescued
from the sea.

This activity along the polders of the North Sea was not typical of the
general trend of European agriculture in the fifteenth century. Agricul-
tural expansion had long reached its limit, and recession had left its mark
upon most countrysides. Abandoned holdings, depopulated and de-
serted villages were to be found not only in the ‘ old lands ’ of the south and
west but also in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg and Prussia. In
the south and west, the acreage of these Wiistungen has been placed as
high as about one-half of the area at one time cultivated ; and the statistical
mode for Germany as a whole has been estimated at about 25 per cent.
These figures probably over-emphasise the contraction, because some
abandoned holdings may represent no more than temporary withdrawals
or changes in the use of land; but when all reservations are made, the
facts are striking enough. The old prosperity had departed and the new
prosperity of the sixteenth century had not come, although there seem to
have been signs of it before 1500. 1

Westward lay the kingdom of France, which between 1050 and 1300
had also known its heroic period of reclamation. Great inroads had been
made upon the woods. The work, carried on by lay lords, ecclesiastics
and peasants, resulted sometimes in new villages and semi-urban settle-
ments (y tiles neuves, bastides, bourgs), sometimes in extension of the old.
Northern France, in the Paris basin, had some of the most favoured
agricultural lands in Europe; the limon-covered uplands of the Pays de
Caux, Picardy, Beauce and other districts were famous for their fertility.
The coastal marshes near St Omer, and those along the estuaries of the
Somme, the Seine and the Loire, and also the Marais Poitevin, had been
drained, at any rate in part. Some of these flooded areas along the west
coast of France formed natural salt pans; those of the Bay of Bourgneuf
to the south of the Loire, for example, were particularly important and
attracted traders from distant ports. It is true there were exceptions to
this tale of conquest. The forests and swamps of the ‘Wet’ Champagne,
in the east of the Paris basin, had been greatly reduced, but it still re-
mained a waterlogged countryside with pools of standing water; and
again, little change of any kind had been wrought in the lakes and marshes
of the Sologne in the south of the basin. In the west, in Celtic Brittany,
compact enclosures replaced the large open fields of the rest of northern

1 For a discussion of these phenomena see : (i) W. Abel, Die Wiistungen des ausgehenden
Mittelalters (Jena, 1943); (ii) H. Pohlendt, Die Verbreitung der mittelalterlichen Wiistungen
in Deutschland (Gottingen, 1950).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

France; there had been clearing and draining as elsewhere, but the soils
of the ancient rocks of the peninsula were poor. Yet, in any general view,
the prosperity of northern France in the Middle Ages had been outstand-
ing. It had outstripped all the lands of the West, and Froissart, writing
early in the fourteenth century, could well declare it to be ‘the fairest
kingdom of the world after the kingdom of heaven ’.

The Hundred Years War changed all this. France became, in the
words of Petrarch (1360), ‘a heap of ruins’. Thomas Basin, bishop of
Lisieux, writing about 1440, said that between the Loire and the Somme
‘ all was a desert. A few patches of cultivated land or a vineyard might
here and there be seen, but only rarely, and never save in the immediate
neighbourhood of a castle or a walled town. ’ The country had become a
prey to wolves and to unemployed mercenaries known under the expressive
name of routiers. Population fell to one-half, even in places to one-
third, of its former level. The marshes of Poitou reverted to their natural
condition. Woods reappeared on the untilled fields, and in Saintonge the
people for a long time said 4 the forests came back to France through the
English’. Some of the accounts may have been exaggerated, but the fact
of desolation is borne out by the legal instruments of the time which tell
a story less embroidered but hardly less impressive; there were contracts
that dealt only in wasted land.

But before the end of the fifteenth century, recovery was in sight. If
we can believe Claude Seyssel, one-third of the kingdom was brought
under cultivation between 1480 and 1510; certainly there was an outburst
of activity and by 1565 Bodin could testify to the flourishing state of the
countryside. Mining activity was also encouraged. Louis XI, in 1471,
created a bureau of mines with powers to grant concessions and to
prospect for ore. German miners were brought in to assist in some en-
terprises. Small iron centres were to be found in many localities — in the
Bocage and Perche districts of Brittany and Normandy, and also in
the Champagne country and in Nivemais and elsewhere. In 1455-6
Charles VII employed Saxon and Bohemian miners to work the silver-
bearing ores of Beaujolais and Lyonnais. But in general the soil of
France was poor in metal ore.

The southern half of France had shared in many of the fortunes of the
north. A period of clearing had been followed by one of devastation, but
these changes had taken place in a different setting. Roughly south of
latitude 46° N. was a different language, Provencal or Langue d'Oc as
opposed to the Langue d' Oil of the north. The south, too, was the land of
4 written law’ (droit ecrit) where Roman law, modified by local usage, was
the general rule; the more Frankish north was the land of customary law
(droit coutumier). In this southern country stands the great upland of the
Central Massif, well over 1500 feet above sea level. Its circumstances
varied, as today. There are fertile valleys of long-established agriculture,

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

and elsewhere the fertility of stretches of volcanic soil is such that they
are cultivated well above the usual limits. But there are also great lime-
stone tracts {causses) that are little better than stony deserts ; and, in the
south-east, the massif rises into the rugged Cevennes where isolated
villages are to be found amidst chestnut woodland. Much of the massif
is occupied by great pasturelands that nourished sheep and cattle, and
exported cheeses. Records from the Middle Ages show the movement of
transhumant flocks and herds from the lowlands around.

To the west, the agricultural plain of Aquitaine included, amongst
others, two distinctive and contrasting localities. One was the rich vine-
growing area of Medoc and Bordelais around the marshes of the Gironde
estuary, linked through its wine trade with England ; its ruined vineyards
were recovering, like the rest of France, from the Hundred Years War.
The other locality was the sandy expanse of the Landes, virtually a waste
widely covered by swamps and lakes behind a belt of coastal dunes; this
fever-haunted region had to await the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
for some effective amelioration of its surface. On the other side of the
Central Massif was the Rhone valley, and here, across the plateau of
Langres, the plain of Europe descends into a different world. The mul-
berry is encountered at Lyons, the evergreen oak at Vienne, the olive
farther south still, near Valence. A local saying has it ‘A Valence le
Midi commence’, for the olive is a good index of Mediterranean con-
ditions. And these, in the fifteenth century as today, were quite different
from those in the Paris basin and all that plain of Europe stretching back
into Russia.

The difference between the climate of the Mediterranean basin and that
of the rest of Europe is striking. The rainfall of the three summer months
(June, July and August) rarely exceeds six inches, and in many areas it is
less than two. The vine and the olive can withstand this drought and,
while the vine can be grown as far north as England, the limits of the
olive follow very closely the margin of the ‘practically rainless summer’.
The winter rain, on the other hand, is sufficient for grain to be grown.
Com, wine and olive oil have been called ‘ the Mediterranean triad ’, and
they have always formed the basis of Mediterranean subsistence.

To what extent the Mediterranean lands were once covered by forest
is uncertain, but it is clear that by the fifteenth century the greater part
of the original cover had disappeared. The characteristic Mediterranean
forest grows in open formation, is largely evergreen in character, and is
quite unlike the dense deciduous woodlands of central and western Europe.
It easily degenerates into scrub, and this process has been aided by human
agency — by clearing for cultivation or fuel, by fires, and by the grazing of
animals. The names given to this scrub in all its variations are many —
maquis, macchia, matorral, garrigue, monte bajo, phrygana — and among its

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

constituents are such aromatic shrubs as lavender, myrtle, rosemary and
thyme. Developed on thin soils, and varied by dwarf evergreens, this
scrub is encountered from Portugal to the Dardanelles; and with its
associated pastures, it provides grazing for sheep and goats. One effect
of clearing has been to accelerate erosion. The soil is swept away by torren-
tial showers, and carried in swollen streams to form deltaic plains such as
those of the Ebro, the Po and the Eurotas; hence the predominance of
bare rock in many upland areas.

Evergreen scrub has been described as ‘the standard vegetation of the
Mediterranean world, common to all its shores’. But there is much local
variation in land use as in climate, varying from steppe to deciduous
forest, and depending upon relief and history. The Iberian peninsula, the
coastlands of France, Italy and the Balkans, each area had its special
characteristics in the fifteenth century as it has today.

The closing years of the fifteenth century in the Iberian peninsula saw
the last phase of the reconquest against the infidel. The Moslems had
swept into Spain in 7 n and within a few years had over-run all the penin-
sula up to the Cantabrians and the Pyrenees. From these strongholds in
the north, the reconquest had begun almost immediately, and had been
marked by the rise of the Christian kingdoms — Castile-Leon, Aragon,
Navarre and Portugal. Their progress had been such that, by the middle
of the thirteenth century, Moslem power was limited to the kingdom of
Granada in the south-east, but it was not until 1492 that this southern
strip was conquered and Moslem rule obliterated from the peninsula. In
the meantime (1469) marriage had prepared the way for the union of the
two crowns of Castile and Aragon ; and early in the next century Navarre
was acquired (1512). With the completion of the reconquest and the union
of the kingdoms, the peninsula emerged, at the dawn of modern times,
divided between Spain and Portugal.

The long years of Moslem occupation had left many marks both on
life and landscape. Some of the great intellectual centres of medieval
Europe were in Spain where Arab learning was made known to the West.
Furthermore, many tangible expressions of Moorish influence were, and
are, to be seen in Spanish architecture. Agriculturally, the Moors made
great contributions both to the development of pastoral activity and to
the extension of cultivation, and thus did much to alter the appearance of
the countryside.

The scarcity of rain on the enormous tableland of central Spain gave
it vast stretches more suitable to pasturage than to cultivation. Sheep-
rearing had long been important here, so had the practice of semi-annual
sheep migrations. But during the Moorish period the rearing of sheep
was greatly extended and its migratory character emphasised. The fact
that the greater part of Spanish pastoral terminology was Arabic is in-
dicative of Moorish influence. What is more, the Moors in the twelfth

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

century introduced the merino sheep, although the word ‘merino’ itself
does not seem to have been used until the middle of the fifteenth century.
As the reconquest proceeded, the expenses of rehabilitation and of agri-
culture were clearly heavier than those involved in the hiring of shepherds
and the use of natural pastures; and the pastoral industry therefore de-
veloped in the new Christian kingdoms in a very marked manner.

The existence of large-scale migratory flocks necessitated organisation,
and in 1273 Alfonso the learned brought ‘all of the shepherds of Castile’
into one association, and, in giving it a title, used a word already con-
nected with the meetings of herdsmen and sheep-owners — the ‘ Honorable
Assembly of the Mesta of the Shepherds’. This organisation grew in
importance and by the fifteenth century its activity and influence was one
of the outstanding facts about the economic life of the peninsula. A
prominent feature of the organisation was the system of special highways
for the use of flocks; they were known by different names, the cabaiieras
of Aragon, the carreradas of Catalonia, the azadores reales of Valencia,
and, above all, the canadas of Castile. These great routeways were, in effect,
elongated grazing grounds connecting the summer pasturages of the north,
around Leon, Soria, Cuenca and Segovia, with the winter homes of the
south in La Mancha, Estremadura, Alcantara and the lowlands of Anda-
lusia. The highways were protected by elaborate regulation, and along
them the sheep travelled for distances up to 350 and 450 miles. The
movement south began in September, and the end of October found the
sheep grazing in their winter homes. The return movement began about
the middle of April and the sheep were clipped at stations on the way
until they were back in the north by the end of May or early June. The
wool was taken to the great fairs, especially that of Medina del Campo,
or to the north-coast ports for shipment to France, England and Flanders.
By the latter years of the fifteenth century, the number of sheep on the
move was over two and a half millions. Similar regulations, though not
as centralised, were to be found in Aragon. Nor were Spanish sheep the
only animals upon the road in Spain, for the ordinances of the town
league of Daroca, south of the Ebro, show us ‘ French, Gascon, Basque
and foreign’ herdsmen coming over the Pyrenees and down the Ebro
valley to winter in Aragon.

These migrating flocks inevitably caused a clash between pastoral and
agricultural interests. Attempts were made to limit cultivation in order to
preserve grazing grounds, and the policy of the Mesta, supported by
royal authority, was one among other factors that brought agrarian
decay to Spain. Furthermore, the Castilian forests suffered greatly from
the frequent passage of migrating sheep, but various conservation mea-
sures, adopted in the thirteenth century, seem to have had some effect
and substantial forests were still to be seen in the fifteenth century.

The influence of the Moors upon cultivation was perhaps even greater

5 29 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

than on sheep rearing. Coming from an even drier land, they knew well
the value of water, and they regarded it as the property of the community
to be used as seemed best for all. Irrigation had been practised in Spain
in Roman and Visigothic times, but, in the years following 71 1, it was
developed and extended in a remarkable manner. The Moors introduced
the noria, a bucket-and-chain device driven by animals, for raising water
from wells. They also, with labour and ingenuity, cut canals and conveyed
water in aqueducts down to the lowlands where they constructed com-
plicated irrigation systems — on the river flats and coastal plains of the
southern and eastern shores, along the Ebro and in Valencia and Murcia,
and also in the Guadalquivir valley. These luxuriant huertas and vegas
were scenes of intensive cultivation and prosperity. New olive trees are
said to have been brought from Africa; the cultivation of the olive became
widespread in the south-east; and despite the injunction of the Prophet,
the vine was also much cultivated. Not only were the older crops of the
peninsula tended but new ones were introduced — sugar cane, cotton,
saffron, rice and the mulberrry. Fruit-growing was also extended with a
wide variety of fruits — oranges, apricots, figs, lemons and pomegranates.
Moslem writers on agriculture were many and they testify to an intense
interest in the problems of cultivation. Nor did this achievement come
to naught in areas from which the Moors were driven out, for their work
was preserved and its harvest reaped by Christians. By the time of the
completion of the reconquest in 1492, these two developments, intensive
agriculture in the south-eastern plains and valleys and extensive sheep
grazing on the tableland, gave Spanish rural life its distinctive character.
But we must not forget that side by side with these more distinctive
activities along the cahadas and on the huertas, the Spanish peasant
struggled with an ungrateful soil in many other areas, and, as the proverb
went, made bread out of stones.

There was also a little exploitation of minerals. Thus the silver mines of
Guadalcanal and the quicksilver mines of Almaden were productive. So
were the iron mines of the Basque provinces. Salt was produced at
Cardona in Catalonia and at other places in the peninsula. But the sum
total of this mineral activity was small.

Mediterranean France had been raided by Moorish pirates but, apart
from one temporary outpost at Fraxinetum near Cannes, it had never
been occupied. Yet, in a milder form and on a smaller scale, it had some
features that recalled conditions in Spain. Here was transhumance, and
immense flocks made their way between plain and mountain along sheep-
ways called carraires, but there was no organisation to correspond with
that of the Mesta and the sheep-owners never had the prerogatives of those
of Spain; the agriculturalists were better able to hold their own and
restrict the movements of flocks. Here, too, was cultivation not only of
the vine and olive but also of fruits such as the orange, the lemon and the

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

apricot. The Spanish huertas served as models for small irrigated areas,
and the cultivation even of sugar cane was attempted. The mulberry had
been introduced and was spreading in the Rhone valley and the foun-
dations were being laid for the development of a silk industry in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Salt was produced in the coastal
marshes of Languedoc and Provence ; some drainage had been undertaken
in Languedoc; and the lower Rhone had been dyked by associations of
levadiers; but the delta itself remained a windswept solitude of marsh and
lagoon. It is to Italy that we must turn for closer parallels with Spain.

In the fifteenth century, as in the nineteenth, Italy was merely a geo-
graphical expression. In the south, in Naples and Sicily, there had been
many changes of dynasty but hardly any changes of frontier. Moslem,
Norman, Angevin and Aragonese had succeeded one another, and at the
end of the fifteenth century the two kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were
held by Spanish princes. In the north, the cities had built territorial
domains around themselves; and Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence and
Siena were the chief political units. Between north and south, the papal
states stretched across the Apennines from Rome to Ravenna and along
the old Via Flaminia. No mantle of political unity covered the diversity
of Italy at the end of the Middle Ages. But if it thus differed politically
from Spain, the rural economies of both lands had a good deal in common.

Since the earliest times migratory flocks had ascended from the coastal
plains up into the hill country of the Apennines. Under Frederick II
(i 1 94-1 250) the regulations governing these various movements were
codified and brought under a central authority, and restriction was placed
upon the sale of lowland for agricultural purposes in order to preserve it
for winter pasturage. When the kingdom of Naples passed to the house
of Aragon in the fifteenth century, it was only natural that the new rulers,
with their homeland in mind, should make further changes designed to
support the pastoral industry, and, incidentally, to increase the tolls
derived from the migrating sheep. Merino sheep were imported from
Spain; no part of the Tavoliere, or lowland around Foggia near the
eastern coast, was allowed to be cultivated ; the sheep-ways were organised
into tratturi delle pecore; further regulations were instituted to control
the movement of flocks ; and pastoralists were given privileges reminis-
cent of those of the Mesta. The regime thus inaugurated remained sub-
stantially the basis of the pastoral economy of southern Italy until the
nineteenth century.

In the interior highlands, rough grazing and brushwood merged into
chestnut groves and forests of fir, beech, oak and other trees. The coastal
plains varied. Some, like the Roman Campagna, the Pontine Marshes
and the Tuscan Maremma, provided pasture for winter grazing, but were
malarial and deserted; and these retained their solitary aspect from
medieval until recent times. Other plains were more fertile. Much of

31 3*

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

the Campania was productive and a part of it, the Terra di Lavoro to the
north of Vesuvius, was one of the most intensively cultivated parts of Italy
in the fifteenth century; the plain of the lower Arno was another. The
traditional and basic crops were cereals, olives and vines; Apulia and
Sicily exported grain at this time despite the summer droughts. But
among the crops there were also newcomers. Arab civilisation had brought
sugar-cane, rice, cotton and the mulberry ; and southern Italy and Sicily
also vied with south-eastern Spain in the production of fruit — oranges,
apricots, figs and the like.

One unusual element in the economy of the western coastlands of the
peninsula was the manufacture of alum at Tolfa near Civita Vecchia.
Alum deposits were discovered here in 1462, and long before the end of
the century the output was very considerable and greatly added to the
income of the papal states. A little iron was also worked in Tuscany,
and there were salt pans along the shores of the Maremma.

To the north, in the plain of Lombardy, the essential Mediterranean
characteristics mingled with those of continental Europe. Here, during the
Middle Ages, much effort had been expended on taming the River Po.
Dykes had been built in the twelfth century as a protection against floods,
and irrigation channels had been constructed to provide water to
improve hitherto barren land. The Cistercian house of Chiaravalle, near
Milan, had an irrigation canal at work in 1138; and La Muzza, Milan’s
great irrigation canal, was completed in 1239. The famous marcite, or
irrigated water meadows, were already productive by the fourteenth
century. Many other irrigation canals were built between the twelfth and
fifteenth centuries to sustain the agriculture of the rich alluvial plain; the
plans for the Martesana canal between Milan itself and the River Adda
are said to have been made by Leonardo da Vinci (1452— 15 19). The
lagoons of the Adriatic coast, especially those of Comacchio, produced
salt.

The mulberry spread widely over the hill slopes, and today the plain is
the main mulberry area in Italy. Rice, known for some centuries in the
south, did not appear in northern Italy until late in the fifteenth century.
We hear of it in 1468 on the plain around Pisa, and in 1475 on the plain of
Lombardy. Its cultivation was promoted by Lodovico Sforza, duke of
Milan, whose model farm won much praise from his contemporaries. But
soon this ‘garden of Europe’, as the plain of Lombardy was called, was
to be plunged into destructive war.

To the east, the Balkan peninsula was entering upon a new phase in
its history. The Ottoman Turks made their first permanent settlement in
Europe in 1354, and in 1361 they not only captured Adrianople but moved
their capital thither from Brusa in Asia Minor. From this base in Thrace
the Turkish conquest of south-eastern Europe was begun. The desperate
resistance of the Slav peoples to the north was broken on the field of

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Kossovo in 1389, and by the middle of the next century the Slav states
had become part of the Turkish empire in name as well as in fact — Bulgaria
in 1382, Serbia in 1459, Bosnia in 1463; the northern frontier of the
empire stretched east-west along the Danube and the Save. To the south,
the curious Latin-Frankish states that had occupied the Greek peninsula
since the Fourth Crusade also fell one by one into Turkish hands until
by 1461 the Turks were in complete control over the whole area, apart
from some scattered points held by the Venetians. The islands of the
Aegean were more difficult to acquire, and over a century was to elapse
before Turkish control was effective (1566). In the meantime, a seal had
been set upon the Turkish dominion in Europe by the capture of Con-
stantinople itself in 1453.

The Frankish occupation of medieval Greece left many traces upon the
countryside in great castles and towers, and their ruins are still to be
seen, but it made little mark upon the Greek population. The medley of
Italians and Frenchmen, Catalans and Navarrese, remained to the end a
series of garrisons in a foreign land. ‘New France’ passed away for ever
before the advance of the Turk, leaving not much more than archaeo-
logical remains to recall a brilliant interlude of western chivalry. The
Turkish occupation from the fifteenth century onwards likewise contri-
buted no appreciable ingredient to the population of the Greek peninsula
itself, but to the north, in the valleys and lowlands of Macedonia and
Thrace, there were substantial tracts of Turkish settlement which lasted
until the exchanges of population after 1923 ; and, in addition, there were
considerable areas of Turkish-speaking peoples in Bulgaria. Turkish
influence was also apparent in the tchliflik, or large estate, worked by a
servile population of Christians and characterised by a low efficiency; it
was, for instance, widespread on the plains of Thessaly and was to be
found all over Bulgaria and southern Serbia as far as a line roughly
connecting the Gulf of Drin and the Iron Gate on the Danube. Other
indications of Turkish influence may still be seen today in the large num-
ber of Albanian Moslems in Albania itself and in Montenegro and south-
ern Serbia, and also in the Bosnian Moslems who present the curious
spectacle of a people Slav in language and race, and yet Mohammedan
in religion. Believers in the Bogomil heresy, ‘they had preferred to be
conquered by the Sultan than converted by the Pope V Other consequences
of the Turkish advance in the fourteenth century were the numerous
Slav migrations northward, and these were to continue in one form or
another for five centuries or so.

There is much that is obscure about the condition of the Balkans under
its new masters in the fifteenth century, but the main lines of its economy
cannot be in doubt. Only a part of the area was typically Mediterranean
in climate and products — the coastal fringe of Dalmatia hemmed in by
1 W. Miller, Essays on the Latin Orient (Cambridge, 1921), p. 494.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

the upland of the interior, Greece itself (and especially the Peloponnese),
and the islands of its seas. Here, life was dominated by the triad of
‘com, wine and olive oil’. The fig and various citrus fruits were also
characteristic. Since the sixth century a.d., when the silk-worm was
smuggled from the East into the Byzantine empire, the cultivation of the
mulberry had spread. So much of the Peloponnese was planted with the
mulberry that, according to one view, it became known as ‘the Morea’
from the Greek name of the tree ( morta); the plain around Thebes was
called ‘ Morokampos ’, and Thebes itself was famous for its silk. But the
thin soil of much of Greece is infertile; such alluvial areas as those of
Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly and Thebes were famed as granaries and
as cattle areas, yet much of their surface was still ill-drained and marshy
and had to await the improvements of recent times. Furthermore, maize
and tobacco had not yet come to add variety to the agricultural economy.
The agricultural achievement of the Balkans in the fifteenth century did
not match that of parts of Italy and Spain. Nor, with the coming of the
Ottoman Turks, did the future hold much promise.

The typical landscape of much of Greece has always consisted of small
cultivated plains above which rise arid foot-hills covered by olive trees or
by scrub that provides pasture for sheep and goats. The foot-hills in turn
rise into mountains forested in part, but also with brushwood and summer
pasture of varying quality. The seasonal migration of flocks was a feature
of the whole of Greece, but it was particularly developed in the moun-
tainous interior to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. Here were the nomad
shepherds known as Vlachs. The name ‘Vlach’ or ‘Wallach’, applied to
them by their neighbours, is identical with the English ‘ Wealh’ or ‘Welsh’
and means ‘stranger’, but the Vlachs call themselves ‘Aromani’, i.e.
Romans. Their origin is obscure, but it is now generally admitted that
they are descended from Roman colonists and latinised provincials, and
that, as their language suggests, they are akin to the Roumanians. Their
presence may be inferred from records as early as the sixth century, but
the first definite mention of them was not until the year 976. During the
next two centuries reference to them becomes frequent, and their mode
of life seems to have been much the same in the eleventh as in the nine-
teenth century. From April to September they lived with their flocks in
the mountains and they descended to the plains only in winter. North-
ward, in this mountain interior, summer rainfall and winter cold increase;
the characteristic Mediterranean vegetation gives way to deciduous forest
and to the deciduous brushwood known by the Serbian name of shiblyak.
Its affinities are with central Europe and not with the south.

Set between the Mediterranean basin and the plain of Europe lies a
mountainous tract for the most part over 1500 feet above sea-level; much
of it is over 5000 feet and it has many heights above 13,000 feet. It is a

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

tract of great variety, ranging from the flat upland surfaces of ancient
worn-down mountains to the irregular array of glittering Alpine peaks,
and from narrow valleys to the great expanse of the Hungarian plain. In
the west was the meeting-place of French, Italian and German speech.
All three languages came to be represented in Switzerland which had
grown up from the union of three cantons around Lake Lucerne in the
thirteenth century. Other cantons joined the union until by 1513 it had
reached a form which it was to retain until the wars of the French Revo-
lution. In the valleys of eastern Switzerland and southern Tyrol a number
of Romance dialects survived from remote times, and these formed a
wedge of Romansch speech set between German and Italian.

In the eastern Alps the rise of the Mark of Austria, established as an
outpost against the Magyar in the tenth century, was accompanied by an
advance of German-speaking peoples comparable to that across the
northern plain. The advance took place not only down the Danube but
also south and south-east into the lands of the Slovenes and the Croats.
Beyond the main frontier of German speech, isolated German settlements
appeared as islands in Slav or Hungarian territory. Thus in 1347 Bavarian
settlers came to Gottschee in Camiola which was described at the time as
a wilderness.

The economy of this central mountainous tract displayed a wide
variety and many differences of detail associated with climatic and geo-
graphical conditions. Yet the area as a whole had gone through an
agrarian history roughly analogous to that of the northern plain. Wide-
spread clearing had changed the face of the countryside. Thus in the
Tyrol, in the early Middle Ages, only the fertile slopes of the valleys of the
Inn and the Etsch had been settled, but by the fifteenth century, colonis-
ation had spread up the side valleys. As in the north, the fifteenth century
was a period of recession and the desertion of farms, particularly those
at a high level. In many alpine areas, the peasants had two homes — a
permanent winter settlement surrounded by cultivated fields in the valley
itself, and a summer hut near high-lying pastures or alps set amid woods
and snow and peaks. Very complicated forms of transhumance resulted
from these arrangements. Some indication of this pastoralism is provided
by the fact that before the end of the Middle Ages butter and cheese were
being sold from the Swiss Alps, and Swiss cattle were being exported
northwards into Germany and southwards into upper Italy.

The upland of Bohemia, clearly bounded by high mountain barriers,
formed a distinct unit in central Europe. The immigration of German
colonists into the Slav lands of Bohemia began on a large scale towards
the end of the twelfth century, and was encouraged by the Bohemian
rulers in order to counteract the power of the native aristocracy. The
Germans came as merchants, clergy and miners, and as peasants clearing
the land. Whole districts along the borders were settled by Germans and

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

this German element has remained a prominent feature of the ethno-
graphic map of Bohemia until recent times. But in spite of this varied
influx and in spite of the importance of German culture, the Bohemian
Slavs never lost their identity as did those of Silesia and Brandenburg to
the north. Furthermore, an internal Slavonic colonisation went on by
which the Czechs themselves reclaimed the wilderness and founded new
villages. In Bohemia there are over 300 place-names that include the
element Ihota, and there are eighty more in Moravia. The word, roughly
speaking, means ‘freedom’ and it was used, in this connection, to denote
the exemptions from render that were sometimes granted to settlements
made on waste or empty land. Its widespread distribution can be taken
as some index of the transforming activity of the Czechs. The word, in
the form of lehota, occurs more than forty times in Slovakia farther east,
but there it seems to have been associated with German and not Slav
activity. The cultivated land thus brought into being in Bohemia was very
adversely affected by the Hussite Wars (1419-36). It has been estimated
that one-sixth of the population perished. Many people left the country
to seek new homes in the west. These Bohemian exiles were often confused
with the gipsies that first appeared in central and western Europe about
this time, and the French word for gipsy ( bohemien ) still recalls this fact.

In addition to Bohemia, there is a second distinctive unit to be con-
sidered. The great plain of Hungary, enclosed by the Carpathian arc, is as
separate racially as it is distinctive geographically from the lands around.
The Magyars in the ninth century had moved westward from the lands
beyond the Don, and their arrival on the plain about the year a.d. 900
was followed by a series of devastating raids that reached even into
France and southern Italy. They were defeated, at Lechfeld near Augs-
burg in 955, and the years that followed saw the transformation of a
predatory horde of nomadic horsemen into a European state, Roman
Catholic in allegiance: the tent was given up for the village, the castle and
the church. The arrival and consolidation of the Magyars had permanent
consequences for the political geography of Europe, for they formed a
wedge separating the northern from the southern Slavs and greatly com-
plicated the affairs of the Danube basin. The flat plain upon which they
settled was far from uniform. Much of it was covered by fertile loess soils
rich in agricultural possibility, but the streams of the Danube and the
Tisza were bordered by wide marshes, and elsewhere, especially between
the two great rivers and in the north-east, there were great stretches of
grass and sand where the so-called puszta was especially characteristic ;
the word puszta in Slavonic means solitude.

The colonising activity so characteristic of Europe between 1000 and
1350 was also manifest here. Benedictine monks not only fostered con-
version but promoted colonisation and the extension of western methods
of agriculture. Arable farming and immense cattle ranches on the pusztas

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

changed the economy of the area. Immigration was encouraged by
successive Magyar kings, and German settlers appeared in country and
town alike. The destruction wrought by the Mongol raids in 1241 was
repaired with the help of German colonists. Thus the population of Vies
(Waitzen) to the north of Budapest, on the left bank of the Danube, was
entirely destroyed and had to be replaced by Germans. Other immigrants
were Slavs fleeing before the Turks, especially after the complete fall of
Serbia in 1459. In 1483 Matthias Corvinus wrote to the pope that 200,000
Serbs had setttled in the south of his kingdom in four years, and there is also
other testimony to the large Serb element in the Voivodina at this time.

To the east of the plain were the mountains of Transylvania. Its Latin
name indicates its forested nature, and its Magyar name, Edily, comes
from Erdo, a forest. This land of mountains and forests seems to have
been appropriated by the Magyars in the tenth and eleventh centuries,
and many settled in the western valleys, notably in that of the Somej.
Apart from the Magyars, Transylvania in the fifteenth century included
three other groups. One was a people of mysterious origin — the Szeklers
— possibly akin to the Magyars themselves and certainly speaking their
language; another was the Roumanians whose arrival in these parts has
been hotly debated by Magyar and Roumanian historians. But the origin
of the third group — that of the Germans — is not in dispute. They came
from the Rhineland, mostly in the twelfth century, at the invitation of the
early kings of Hungary, to fell the frontier forests and to become farmers
and miners; the presence of German speech in the area today is some
memorial to their activity. In 1224 they were granted a remarkable
charter which gave them a measure of autonomy.

Thus by 1500 some of the main elements in the later ethnic problems
of Hungary were already apparent. Further settlement and further com-
plication were to come as a result of the arrival and then the withdrawal
of the Turk. During the fifteenth century the Magyars had played a great
part in resisting the Turkish advance, but in 1526 they were defeated at
Mohacz on the banks of the Danube, and all but a western strip fell into
Turkish hands until 1699.

One of the characteristic features of the mountain belt as a whole was
the mining activity that was to be found throughout it. At many places,
seams of ores containing iron, copper, lead, silver, gold, zinc and tin, as
well as coal, lay near the surface or broke through it, and the origins of
the exploitation of many of these seams stretch back into remote times.
The vicissitudes of mining during the Middle Ages culminated towards
the end of the fifteenth century in a boom, particularly in silver. ‘Between
1460 and 1530’, writes J.U.Nef, ‘the annual output of silver in central
Europe increased several times over, perhaps more than five-fold. u What

1 The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. M. Postan and E. E. Rich (Cambridge,

1952), vol. 11, p. 470.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

was true of silver was true, in varying degrees, of copper and iron ; and
there was also an increasing interest in coal seams. If the amounts
appear small to us, and the technology primitive, we must consider them
in the context of their time. In 1523 Charles V placed the number of
people employed in mining and metallurgy in his empire at about 100,000.

Coal mining was never important in the Middle Ages. Coal was dug
in many places, but only around Liege and at Mons to the west had it
attained any prominence by the fifteenth century; Liege coal competed
in the Channel ports with 4 sea-coal ’ from Newcastle. Iron-working was
scattered in the nearby forests of the Condroz and the Ardennes. Iron
mining and smelting were also widespread in the plateaus of Rhineland-
Westphalia and especially in the uplands of Siegerland and Sauerland
between the Ruhr and the Sieg. Not far away, the discovery of calamine
(the ore of zinc) at Moresnet near Aachen during the fifteenth century
led to the manufacture of brass and to a demand for copper. Some
silver as well as iron was mined in these and other highlands of the
Rhine basin — in the Siegerland, the Spessart, the Black Forest and the
Vosges. Deposits of low-grade iron ore were also worked in Lorraine,
and there were salt works here around the rich brine springs at Dieuze.
Salt, too, was manufactured at the great establishment at Salins in Franche
Comte. There were also mines of silver-bearing lead and copper ores in
the Lyonnais and Beaujolais districts of the Central Plateau of France-
Across the Channel, iron, lead, silver and copper were being mined in
England; and tin from Cornwall and Devon entered the European
market.

But it was in the east that medieval mining reached its highest develop-
ment. Ores of silver mixed with lead or copper were widely distributed,
and their exploitation was greatly stimulated by the discovery, about
1450, that silver could be effectively extracted from argentiferous copper
ores with the aid of lead. One of the main mining centres since the tenth
century had been the Harz mountains. The great silver and copper
deposits of the Rammelsberg, near Goslar, were actively worked and the
fame of Goslar as a mining centre was widespread. There were other
centres in the Harz area, and not far to the east there were mines at
Mansfeld where Martin Luther’s father worked as a miner. Nearby at
Halle, in the valley of the Saale, there were salt works. Silver-bearing ores
were discovered during the second half of the twelfth century in the
Erzgebirge, and on the Saxon slopes of these mountains mining camps
grew into towns; Freiberg was founded in 1171, and there were other
mining centres at Annaberg, Marienberg and Schneeberg. Tin was mined
around Altenberg and also around Zinnwald on the Bohemian side of
the Erzgebirge. Farther east still, in Silesia, there were silver centres at
Tamowitz, Gottesberg and Waldenburg; Reichenstein yielded gold as
well as silver.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

To the south of Saxony and Silesia lies Bohemia, which has been de-
scribed as ‘ the Nevada of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages’. German
mining camps grew into towns in an area hitherto Czech in population.
Joachimstal, Kuttenberg, Iglau, Deutschbrod and other mining towns
were German in origin. This mineral wealth explains much of the im-
portance of Bohemia in the later medieval history of Europe. The Hussite
Wars (above, p. 36) left some of the mining towns in ruins, but they had
recovered before the end of the century. Eastwards, in Slovakia, there
were important copper and silver mines around Neusohl, Kremnitz and
Schemnitz, exploited for centuries with the aid of German miners; and
at Wieliczka in Poland there were salt mines. Other mining centres for
copper, silver and lead lay to the south, in the eastern Alps : in the Tyrol
(particularly around Schwaz, near Innsbruck); to the south of Salzburg;
and in Styria, Carinthia and Camiola. Salt was also worked at a number
of places in the Tyrol and elsewhere; Styria contained some of the leading
iron centres on the Continent, and their production quadrupled between
the I46 o’s and the 1530’s. Calamine was discovered in the Tyrol and in
Carinthia during the fifteenth century, and quicksilver was mined at
Idria in Camiola. The coming of skilled German miners into eastern
Europe was part of the general eastward movement of the Germans
during the Middle Ages. Small isolated groups of Saxon miners were to
be found, for example, at Srebrenica in Bosnia ( srebro means silver) and
at Novo Brdo in Serbia. Ragusans also aided in the exploitation of the
Serbian silver and copper deposits. Much more important were the so-
called ‘Saxons’ of Transylvania who had come from the Rhineland as
early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be farmers and miners.
The minerals included silver, lead and copper, some gold and also salt.

This mining activity at the close of the Middle Ages is epitomised in
the activity of the great merchant family of the Fuggers of Augsburg. At
the end of the fifteenth century they controlled silver, copper and iron
mines in Silesia, Slovakia, Bohemia, Tyrol, Carinthia and also in Spain.
The progress of much of European mining was bound up with the ex-
traction of silver from copper and lead ores, and the discovery of rich
silver ores in the New World, especially those of Potosi in Bolivia about
1546, was to deal a blow not only to European silver mining but to
European mining in general.

If the fifteenth-century countryside was largely the product of the
pioneering activity of the Middle Ages, the fifteenth-century town was the
result of medieval trading activity. Most towns owed their sites to local
and particular causes; they grew around fortified centres, or about
cathedrals, or at the nodal points of roads and waterways, or near har-
bours. Nor were those towns that had been deliberately planted, par-
ticularly in colonial Germany, without advantages of local topography.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

But if the origins of individual towns are bound up with local circum-
stances, we must look elsewhere for an explanation of that general mani-
festation of urban growth that had characterised eleventh- and twelfth-
century Europe. That explanation lies in a revival of commerce which
brought distant lands closer together and made possible an exchange of
products between districts that differed in climate and in stage of de-
velopment. Expanding cultivation, growing industry, productive mining
and increasing population are bound up one with another and with
reviving trade. It is difficult to separate cause and effect, but we can at
any rate discern symptoms, and one of the most marked symptoms of a
new economic order had been the growth of cities, large and small.

But the so-called commercial revolution of the twelfth century did not
continue without a break into the expanding economy of the sixteenth
century. Just as arable cultivation contracted in the late fourteenth and
early fifteenth centuries, so did commercial activity. Wars, epidemics,
the interruption of the eastern trade, and perhaps other and obscure
causes resulted in a lessening of production, in a diminution of cargoes
and in the stagnation and even decline of towns. It has been estimated,
for example, that the population of the north German cities decreased
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by some 20 per cent. But,
in general, the statistical evidence is far from certain, and one must
always remember that within the general contraction there were local
shifts. Thus the golden age of the Catalan merchant was over when the
French seaports were reviving, and when the Portuguese were pioneering
along the west African coast and opening up new vistas of expansion.

Broadly speaking, medieval Europe comprised two commercial worlds
— that of the Baltic and the North Sea, and that of the Mediterranean.
They were connected by land and by sea. By land, Italian traders had
found their way across the Alpine passes in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, and the fairs of the Champagne district had provided con-
venient meeting places for southern and northern merchants. But long
before the early fourteenth century, when the fairs started to decline and
to shrink to provincial markets, the Italians had established contacts with
other centres in France, England, Flanders and also in Germany, Hun-
gary and Poland. By sea, the galleys of Genoa and Venice had reached
the ports of the North Sea before the end of the thirteenth century, and
in succeeding centuries these contacts grew into considerable proportions.
For long, the chief meeting place on these northern shores had been the
port of Bruges; but in the fifteenth century, partly because of the silting
of the Zwin which connected the port with the sea, and partly because of
political complications, Bruges was succeeded by Antwerp as a terminus
of routes. Yet, spectacular though they were, these numerous contacts
between south and north, by land and sea, were not the most important
feature of medieval trade. This was the separate activity that went on

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

within each of the two worlds of the Baltic-North Sea and the Mediter-
ranean. We are fortunate in having two English views of European com-
merce in the fifteenth century. The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, by an
anonymous author, appeared in 1436, 1 and Sir John Fortescue’s Como-
dytes of England was written about the same time. 2

The characteristic commodities of the northern trade, unlike those of
the south, were not luxuries but necessities. A prominent item, and an
important one to Catholic Europe, was fish. The waters around Iceland
yielded stockfish, but the main sources of fish lay nearer at home. The
herring which now ranges mainly on the western side of the North Sea,
was then abundant in the eastern parts and especially in the southern
Baltic. The fisheries of Skania, in southern Sweden, had long been the
most important in Europe, and the trade in dried and salted fish formed
one of the chief branches of northern commerce. During the course of
the fifteenth century the fisheries of Skania came to be rivalled and re-
placed by those of the North Sea as the main source of supply. The dis-
appearance of summer herring shoals in the Baltic is obscure, 8 but before
the fisheries of Skania had finally ceased to be productive, the Dutch were
building up their herring trade in the North Sea. The distribution and
marketing of the herring catch gave opportunities for return cargoes,
and, in the words of a Dutch contemporary, ‘The herring keeps Dutch
trade going, and the Dutch trade sets the world afloat.’ Set midway
between the northern and southern seas, Amsterdam, Flushing, Rotter-
dam and other ports of the Netherlands were well placed for developing
large-scale entrepot trade, but the finest flowering of this was yet to come.

The salt involved in the preparation of the fish came from a variety of
sources, from Ltineburg, for example, and especially from the estuaries
of the western coast of France; there, the Bay of Bourgneuf was fre-
quented by the salt fleets of all the northern peoples. Another important
item of food was grain. It was exported from the fertile lands of northern
France, from England and the Rhineland, and, more recently, from the
newly colonised lands of eastern Germany. Upon such sources did the
dense population of industrial Flanders rely. Another commodity was
wine, and by the fifteenth century the commercial production of wine had
become concentrated in a few specialised areas — Poitou, Gascony,
Burgundy and the lands along the Moselle; the connection between
Gascony and England was particularly close.

But foodstuffs do not exhaust the list. From the fourteenth century
onwards, the vast coniferous forests of Poland, Livonia, Russia and

1 G. Warner (ed.), The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (Oxford, 1926). The author seems to
have been Adam Moleyns, afterwards bishop of Chichester.

* Printed in The Works of Sir John For rescue, 2 vols. (London, 1869).

* Otto Pettersson, ‘The connection between hydrographical and meteorological
phenomena’. Quarterly Journal Royal Meteorological Society, vol. 38 (London, 1912),
pp. 173 - 91 -

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Scandinavia began to assume an importance in the water-borne commerce
of the north, especially as the woodlands of the west had retreated before
the plough. Not only timber itself, but the miscellany known as ‘forest
products’ — pitch, tar, potash — were important. From these northern
lands also came some luxuries — amber for ornaments, wax for candles
and, not least, furs for warmth as well as for appearance. Yet another
commodity was wool, and it was upon imported wool that the most
highly specialised industrial regions of fifteenth-century Europe were
based. The chief exporting area had long been England, and the chief
receiving area included the Low Countries and northern France. By the
thirteenth century, Flanders and the neighbouring districts had become
the principal manufacturing area of north-western Europe. The stream of
textiles flowing south and east had been augmented before 1400 by English
cloth, and in the fifteenth century England became mainly an exporter of
manufactured woollens rather than of raw wool. The development of the
fulling mill on streams not only produced changes in the location of cloth-
making in England, but gave the country as a whole an advantage over
Flanders. That the cloth centres in the west of England, in East Anglia
and in Yorkshire were growing rich is testified by the magnificence of
some of their Perpendicular churches. By the end of the century, English
cloth was a very prominent item in the international trade of Europe and,
if Erasmus is to be believed, it was finer in quality than any other.

Nourished by this trading activity and by these industries, the towns of
northern and western Europe flourished. In Flanders and Brabant, ac-
cording to one estimate, the urban population was as great as, and perhaps
greater than, the rural population. Nowhere on the Continent, save in
northern Italy, were the towns so numerous, so large and so active. The
medieval buildings of the Flemish towns, especially their Cloth Halls and
their Hotels de Ville tell a story of prosperity. Many towns had their
specialities. Arras gave its name to the hanging curtain called arras;
Cambrai to cambric; Lille to lisle thread; Valenciennes manufactured
valence; the diaper pattern came from Ypres. Then again, some cities
excelled in metal work, especially Li&ge in iron, and Dinant in copper.
Other towns producing cloth included Brussels, Malines, Louvain, Douai
and Amiens; a complete list would be a long one. It is difficult to be
certain about the size of these towns, and estimates have varied greatly. 1
There certainly cannot have been many towns with over 20,000 in-
habitants; the population of Arras, for example, seems barely to have
exceeded 20,000. But the most such figures can do is to give us some
rough idea of the order of magnitude involved.

England had nothing to compare with this constellation of towns. At
the end of the century, London itself seems to have had not more than

1 For a convenient summary of some of the problems see IX Congris international des
sciences historiques, Rapports (Paris, 1950), pp. 55-80.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

60.000 inhabitants. Far below it came Norwich with about 12,000 and
Bristol with perhaps 10,000 people. Bristol had grown rapidly in recent
years as a result of trade with Ireland and the Continent. Below these
came a dozen or so towns with populations of between 5000 and 10,000.
The average size of most market towns, that served the surrounding
countryside, seems to have been well below the 2000 mark. 1 In France,
on the other hand, was the queen of all the western cities. Paris, apparently,
had a population approaching 200,000, and its size and beauty evoked
the admiration of traveller after traveller. Lyons, well placed on the
Saone, was a notable trading centre with widespread connections; its
bourse, opened in 1506, is the oldest in France; its silk and printing
industries were well known. Along the west coast, there was a stirring of
life after the Hundred Years War. Bordeaux and Bayonne shipped wine;
and La Rochelle, Nantes, Rouen and Dieppe likewise grew rich by trade.

To the east of France, the long-established cities of the Rhineland stood
out prominently. It is an intrinsically fertile area and its rivers provide
arteries for trade. Cologne, set between Flanders and southern Germany,
was well placed for commerce, and its linen cloth and metal industries
were important; yet its population has been placed at not more than
35,000. Upstream were well-known centres like Coblenz, Mainz, Frank-
fiirt-am-Main, Worms, Strassburg, Freiburg, Basle and a host of others
that were seats of industry as well as foci of local life. Estimates of their
size vary; Strassburg may have had 25,000 inhabitants, but the others were
considerably smaller, and the usual range of population seems to have
been between below 10,000, and sometimes considerably so.

In southern Germany, a group of cities was sustained in part by the
trade across the Alpine passes — Numberg, Ulm, Regensburg, Passau,
Vienna, Zurich, Augsburg, Munich, Salzburg, Innsbruck; to them must
be added the mining towns of Bohemia and elsewhere. All these, and
others in the region, enjoyed a remarkable prosperity in the latter part of
the fifteenth century, yet none of them seems to have contained more than

20.000 inhabitants, and many little more than 10,000. The Fugger family
of Augsburg built up enormous mining interests in Germany, Hungary
and Spain, and their commercial interests were even more widespread,
extending in the next century into America and Asia. The Fuggers have
been described as the financiers of the Habsburgs and they were able to
interfere decisively in the international politics of the age. All this in-
fluence stemmed from the initiative of Johannes Fugger, a linen weaver
of Augsburg in the fourteenth century. The house of Fugger was not the
only merchant dynasty of these south German towns. The merchants
of Numberg had agents in Liibeck and connections in East Prussia and
Livonia; they had contacts with the Rhineland cities and interests in

1 W. G. Hoskins, ‘English provincial towns in the early sixteenth century’, Trans. Roy.
Hist. Soc. 5th series, v (1956), 1-19.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

north Italy. They brought Baltic herrings to Salzburg and Polish oxen
to Frankfurt-am-Main, and they sold eastern spices and western textiles
in the markets of central Europe.

In the north, between the Rhine and the Elbe, was another group of
towns — Dortmund, Soest, Munster, Goslar, Brunswick, Magdeburg and
others less notable. Serving local markets and sustained by local industry
and by distant connections, they grew up to a modest size, mostly, it
seems, below the 5000 mark. Hamburg and Bremen, as ports, shared
in the activities of the northern seas and exported, amongst other things,
grain and salt. Beyond the Elbe was the great array of new towns that
had been deliberately founded between 1200 and 1400, on virgin sites
or on sites of earlier Slavonic settlements several times destroyed. Their
carefully laid-out rectangular streets formed a contrast with the tortuous
ways of the western cities. Many of these towns served as local market
centres for the new villages around. Some grew into prominence as foci
of administration or, more particularly, as links in the wider commerce
between East and West. Liibeck, founded as a German town in 1143,
became an emporium of northern trade and one of the most important
centres around the Baltic; its population seems to have been just over
20,000. But there were other prominent centres in this new colonial area :
Rostock, Wismar, Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin and Stettin were familiar
names, and beyond lay such centres as Danzig, Marienburg, Elbing,
Thom and Konigsberg. Farther east still, in Livonia and Estonia, were
Riga (founded as long ago as 1201), Dorpat, Reval and many other Ger-
man fortified centres. The new foundations east of the Elbe numbered
between one and two thousand. From the Baltic shores, German mer-
chants reached out to establish a ‘Kontor’ or settlement at the great
centre of Novgorod and subsidiary factories at Pskov, Polotsk, Vitebsk
and Smolensk. Elsewhere in the Baltic lands the same motivating force
can be discerned. Towns as economic centres appeared in Sweden be-
tween 1200 and 1400, particularly in the Malardalen region that stretches
west of Stockholm, and Stockholm itself grew as a terminus of the trans-
Baltic trade with Liibeck. On the island of Gotland, Wisby was well
placed as a centre for German merchants. On the other side of the penin-
sula, Bergen stood out, with connections not only to the south but
westward, by way of the Shetlands and the Faroes, with Iceland.

Different in size, different in appearance, with varying constitutional
histories and divergent activities, all these towns bore a family resemblance.
Their inhabitants — or at any rate many of them — were engaged in trade
and industry. The life-blood of a town was trade, and consequently the
townsfolk were always at the mercy of political disturbance and heavy
tolls, to say nothing of robber barons and river pirates. It is not surprising
therefore that many cities, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, had
formed leagues for mutual protection; there had been, for example, a

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

league of the Rhineland cities and another of the south German cities.
The greatest and most enduring of all these associations was the Hanseatic
League, and it serves more than anything else to epitomise the trading
activity and the town development of the northern economic realm of
Europe. Two circumstances made it possible. One was the development
of a network of commercial relations extending from the English Channel
to the Gulf of Finland, from London to Novgorod, and from Cologne to
Bergen. It is difficult to say how many towns belonged to the League, for
the number was constantly fluctuating, but the usual estimate at the height
of its power is eighty. These lay not only along the coast but also along
the waterways of the north German plain. It was organised into four
‘circles’ with centres at Liibeck, Danzig, Brunswick and Cologne; Ham-
burg and Bremen were prominent members.

But by the fifteenth century the power of the League had passed its
zenith. There were divergencies of interest and political difficulties; and
the decline of the Baltic herring industry was a blow to individual mem-
bers. Amsterdam was to gain what Lubeck lost. As the fifteenth century
drew to a close, Dutch and English maritime enterprise was competing
with that of the Hanse, so that even before the oceanic discoveries,
‘most of its teeth were out and the rest loose’, as one English observer in
Germany put it. The earliest returns of the toll-stations at the Sound
date from 1495, and they show that the shipping bound for the Baltic was
predominantly Dutch. Thus was the stage set for an even greater expansion
of Dutch shipping out into the wide ocean.

The activity in the north was rivalled, and indeed exceeded, by that
around the Mediterranean. The southern peninsulas of Europe stretched
forth to meet not only fresh continents, fresh climates and fresh products,
but also a different civilisation that extended far behind the Mediterranean
coastlands. ‘Muslim merchants’, it has been said, ‘could travel from
Spain to India without feeling that they were going to foreign lands’, 1
and not only to India but well into Africa and the oases of the Sahara.
The trade of these far distant lands brought to Europe exotic goods of
many kinds. Spices figured prominently and included pepper, ginger,
cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace. Among other rare commodities
were such drugs as cubebs, cardamoms, camphor and tragacanth together
with perfumes, sugar, precious stones, dyestuffs (indigo, madder, saffron),
alum and carpets. And in return went western woollens and linen together
with some raw wool, metals and hides. These and other commodities
entered and left the Mediterranean world through the Red Sea or the
Persian Gulf or overland from the Black Sea across Central Asia. It is
easy, therefore, to appreciate the importance of such ancient centres as

1 The Cambridge Economic History of Europe , ed. M. Postan and E. E. Rich (Cambridge,
1952), vol. 11, p. 283.

(5 45 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Constantinople and Alexandria. Constantinople, in particular, stood out
as one of the great cities of the world. Benjamin of Tudela, in the twelfth
century, had described it as ‘a great business centre whither merchants
come from all countries of the world’; travellers were struck by its in-
dustrial enterprises — its silk industry, its metal-work in gold and silver,
and its armament factories. It still remained a very considerable com-
mercial centre in the fifteenth century, and in the East too there were
other great trading cities like Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Smyrna, Trebi-
zond and Salonica. The coming of the Turk, and in particular the fall
of Constantinople in 1453, interrupted but did not permanently block the
immemorial trade routes. 1

In the meantime the glittering prizes of Mediterranean trade had been
won by the Italian cities. It was they who provided the connecting links
between the trade routes of the Near East and those of transalpine
Europe. Their merchants sought oriental wares in the termini of Egypt,
the Levant and the Black Sea, and then distributed them across the passes
of the Alps or by sea through the Straits of Gibraltar. And of these
Italian cities the greatest was Venice. Set upon a cluster of islands amid
marshes and lagoons at the head of the Adriatic, the Venetians had ex-
ploited their advantages of location with shrewd policy. That they could
undertake the transport of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 was a measure of
their maritime strength, and, as a result of that Crusade, the Byzantine
empire was replaced by a congeries of Latin states around the Aegean;
and Venice, in her own phrase, received ‘one-fourth and a half of the
Greek empire’. In the centuries that followed, the Venetians increased
their colonies in the Aegean and elsewhere by conquest or by purchase.
‘Never’, we are told, ‘was there a state so completely dependent upon
the sea. ’ Structurally, the Venetian empire had come to consist of a series
of strategic points, calling stations, islands and merchant quarters in
cities, all strung along the greatest of medieval trade routes. This maritime
state was not without its weakness, and during the fourteenth century a
policy of expansion overland had been reluctantly initiated. The guiding
considerations were two — the need of grain- and meat-producing areas
which the empire of fragments did not provide, and the necessity of se-
curing the alpine approaches to the northern markets. Successive advan-
ces brought Padua, Verona, Brescia and Bergamo under Venetian control,
and Venetian territory in the latter part of the fifteenth century extended
westward almost to Lake Como. The population of the city itself at this
time has been placed at nearly 100,000; Philippe de Commines could well
describe it as ‘the most triumphant city I have ever seen’.

Rivalling Venice in the eastern waters was Genoa, a city of about one-
half its size, but the great struggle was long over by the fifteenth century,

1 A. H. Lybyer, ‘The Ottoman Turks and the routes of oriental trade’, Eng. Hist. Rev.
vol. xxx (London, 1915), pp. 577-88.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

and it had left Genoa in a position of inferiority. Even so, the Genoese
were far from inactive; their commercial depots were many and extended
to the Crimea where CafFa, lost to the Ottomans in 1475, had become a
city as large as, or larger than, Genoa itself, a cosmopolitan mart where
Turks, Tartars, Russians, Poles, Armenians and Greeks mingled. The
Genoese were also exploiting the alum mines of Phocea and the rich
mastic plantations of Chios, and they exercised control of varying duration
over Lesbos, Thasos, Samos, Icaria and other islands of the Aegean.
With the coming of the Ottoman, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453,
there were many oscillations in Venetian and Genoese suzerainty over the
Aegean islands, but Venice was able to keep Crete and in 1489 to acquire
Cyprus.

The great arteries of trade in the eastern Mediterranean had been
supplemented long before 1400 by regular convoys from Venice and
Genoa to the ports of Flanders and England, and there were Venetian
and Genoese agents in many western cities. Merchants from both cities
also visited the ports of North Africa, and in 1447 a Genoese agent,
Antonio Malfante, travelled into the heart of the desert, and from the
large oasis of Tuat he wrote a report about the caravan trade with the
rich countries along the Niger whence came gold and ivory in exchange
for copper and other merchandise.

There had been other Italian competitors for the eastern trade. Amalfi
had lost its glory in 1343 when a large part of the town was destroyed by
an inundation of the sea. Pisa had been hampered by the opposition of
Genoa and by complications within Tuscany. Salerno, Gaeta, Leghorn
and many a smaller port had shared in the crumbs from the Venetian
table. Naples, with some 100,000 inhabitants, was a metropolitan city as
well as a port. Another important centre was the great cosmopolitan city
of Palermo where Greeks, Latins, Moslems, and Jews occupied separate
quarters of the town.

But trade was not the only sustaining force of the Italian cities ; industry
was also important. Venice was an important glass-making centre, and also
wove silk and woollen cloth. Elsewhere in Lombardy, the woollen
industry, although it had arisen later than in the north, had become
important in a variety of cities — Bergamo, Bologna, Brescia, Como,
Cremona, Mantua, Padua, Parma, Verona and Vicenza. Among these,
Milan, witha population of perhaps 100,000, stood out as a metallurgical as
wellasa textile centre. Another cluster of textile towns was in Tuscany. The
silk industry of Lucca, although it had lost some of its greatness, was
still important. Pisa was another textile centre. But overshadowing all
was Florence, with 50,000 people ; her industry was built upon imported
wool from England and, by this time, more particularly Spain. Machia-
velli had been born in the city in 1469, and his History of Florence, which
carries the story up to 1492, shows the importance of commercial rivalry

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

in shaping the policy of the Italian cities. Not all cities emerged as trium-
phantly from the economic circumstances of the time. Some, like Siena,
Pavia, Ferrara and Ravenna, took second place. Others were still farther
behind and remained little more than market centres for their surrounding
countrysides.

Prominent though the Italian cities were, they were not the only active
agents in the commerce of the Mediterranean. Southern France was
beginning to recover from a century of disorganisation. Thus the city of
Montpellier, greatly reduced at the beginning of the fifteenth century,
was stimulated into new activity by the enterprise of Jacques Cceur about
1440; the French competed against the monopoly of Venice and re-
established contacts with Egypt, Syria and North Africa. The story of
Jacques Cceur has become legendary, but it is only one indication amongst
others of French activity. Louis XI (1461-83), immediately after the occu-
pation of Roussillon, began work on the harbour of Collioure. Towards
the end of his reign, he at last obtained possession of Marseilles, and
announced that it was to become the emporium at which merchandise
from the East would be unloaded, to be distributed to all the countries of
the West. He planned the building of a great Mediterranean fleet, and,
although he died before his project could be realised, he had given an im-
petus to French activity in the Mediterranean.

Another competitor in the Mediterranean was Aragon, which, amid the
complicated politics of the western basin, had acquired the Balearic Islands
and Sardinia and had extended her sway over Sicily and Naples. But
these were not the only markets for Catalan wool and woollens. Catalan
merchants traded with Ragusa and other ports of the Adriatic, with
Egypt and the Levant generally, with the Barbary Coast, and, beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, with Flanders and England. But owing to internal
politics and to Italian competition, Catalan influence was in decline in
the fifteenth century; it is doubtful whether Barcelona had as many as
35,000 inhabitants, and Valencia was even smaller. We have a memorial of
earlier activity in the remarkably fine portolan charts of the Catalan seamen.

The interior of the Iberian peninsula had nothing to rival the cities of
Italy, but, even so, its bare monotony was relieved by small centres of vivid
life. ‘Toledo the rich’, ran the old Spanish tag, ‘Salamanca the strong,
Leon the fair, Oviedo the divine, and Seville the great. ’ But there were
also many other centres of industry, of marketing and administration and
of learning, Cordoba with its leather, Jaen with its silk and paper,
Saragossa with its cloth; and besides these there were Burgos, Valladolid,
Segovia, and the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain, the beautiful
city of Granada. Madrid was but a small agricultural town and did not
become the capital of a united Spain until 1560. In the north, the small
Biscayan ports traded with Gascony and Normandy and with England
and Flanders, particularly in iron and wool.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE FACE OF EUROPE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

On the west lay Portugal, slow in developing a maritime trade but with
possibilities. From its harbours, and especially from Lisbon and Oporto,
ships carried wine and dried fruits and olive oil northwards, and there
was a Portuguese agency in Bruges before 1400. But its destiny lay to the
south. In the fifteenth century, with the encouragement of Prince Henry,
generally known as ‘the Navigator’, successive expeditions sailed along
the west African coast, and, incidentally, many Genoese sailors took
part in these. Cape Verde was reached by 1445, and in 1461, a year after
Henry’s death, the Portuguese sailed into the Gulf of Guinea. In 1487
Bartolomeu Dias succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good Hope.
Meanwhile, a Portuguese expedition under Covilha had been sent out
to the Near East, and had reached India by sea from Egypt. His reports
encouraged further effort and, on 8 July 1497, an expedition under
Vasco da Gama sailed from the Tagus river. In the following year, on
23 May, it anchored off Calicut on the Malabar Coast of India. When
asked what they wanted, the Portuguese replied ‘Christians and spices’.
Laden with ginger, cinnamon, pepper, cloves and the like, the first ships
of the return voyage reached Lisbon on 10 July 1499.

In the meantime, a Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus, had settled
in Lisbon in 1477; but, finding little response to his schemes, he left for
Castile in 1484, and after a long struggle for recognition, he began his
famous voyage on 3 August 1492. There is much that is obscure about
our knowledge of Portuguese endeavour down the African coast, and even
more controversy surrounds the aims and beliefs of Columbus. But one
thing is clear. These Portuguese-Spanish achievements came not only at
the end of a century but marked the end of an age. The trade of the mar-
ginal seas of Europe was now to be extended into the great oceans beyond.
The life of Europe, its economic circumstances and its political character,
and also its human geography, took on a new aspect.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER III

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION
AND THE RENAISSANCE

I N the history of the events which changed the face of Europe around
1500, we must distinguish two interlocking developments. Besides the
cultural transformation from which the term ‘Renaissance’ has been
borrowed to describe the whole period, there was the emergence of the
states-system of modern Europe. During the last decades of the fifteenth
century, England, France, and Spain, after long and complex preparation,
had attained national unification under strong monarchies. In addition,
a bilingual state had grown up in the rich border-lands of France and
Germany — the State of the dukes of Burgundy. Since France, with an
estimated fifteen million inhabitants, was potentially far superior to any
of her competitors and, indeed, represented a type of Great Power not yet
realised elsewhere (there were only about three million inhabitants in
England, six million in Spain, and hardly more than six million in the
State of Burgundy with the inclusion of industrial Artois, Flanders, and
Brabant), France’s neighbour-states of necessity combined their resources.
The German empire, France’s only equal in population, could not serve
as a piece on the new European chess-board because it was a loose
federation of territorial states and half-independent cities under the Habs-
burgs, who had little power as German emperors. In its Austrian and
Alpine dominions, however, this house possessed the largest and strongest
of the territorial states, and so the anti-French counterpoise was built upon
a system of princely marriage alliances, first (1477) between Habsburg
and Burgundy, and subsequently (1496) between Habsburg-Burgundy
and Spain. The years around 1500, therefore, saw the encounter of two
gigantic Powers or power combinations such as had not been known to
the medieval world; and when, beginning with the early 1520’s, England
endeavoured to become the moderator of the balance between France
and Habsburg-Spain, the modern pattern of an equilibrium of states had
been established on the European scene.

It was the same generation from about 1490 to 1520 which experienced
the ascendancy of Renaissance art, humanism, and a new historico-
political science. (The growth of natural science did not reach a com-
parable phase of maturity until half a century later.) However, there
exists a basic difference between this cultural revolution and the political
transformation. It would be difficult to contend that outside Italy the
new aesthetic values in art and literature, or the fresh views opened up
in education and humanistic learning, had gradually matured in inter-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

relation with the political development. Their roots were not in the soil of
the west European countries; rather they lay in a part of Europe which
had not shared in the process of large-scale political integration, but was
to become the helpless object of the power politics of the new giant
states: the Italian peninsula. This is not to say that Renaissance culture
north of the Alps was merely an importation from the south. The art of
France, Flanders, and Germany in the fifteenth century leaves no doubt
that there was everywhere in the air a fresh realism ; not only in Italy, but
also in the northern countries, a growing individualism was striving for
expression. Moreover, after contact with Italy had been made, the art
and literature which finally emerged showed in every European nation a
different texture, according to the native traditions. Yet the Renaissance
artists, writers, and scholars outside Italy, from the late fifteenth century
onward, were persuaded that the new era in art, literature, education, and
scholarship had had its first and model phase in Italy; that their own
inherited ways were hopelessly outdated ; and that no future progress was
possible in any field without deliberate efforts to absorb the best that had
been attained south of the Alps. What were the factors in late medieval
civilisation, especially during the fifteenth century, that had produced
this situation?

For many of the aspirations of the Middle Ages a turning-point was
reached when the Church Councils of Constance (1414-18) and Basle
(1431-49) succeeded in ending the schism, which had tom the unity of
the Church but failed to satisfy the long-sustained hopes for religious
reform and a moderation of the strictly monarchical fabric of the Church.
The programme then frustrated had chiefly been elaborated by the medi-
eval universities ; the leaders of the party of reform had been the fore-
most minds of those great centres of scholastic learning which had earlier
been productive of bold political philosophies and had incessantly
explored and adapted to changing conditions the fundamental questions
of the relation between Church and State and of the mutual obligation
between ruler and people. The intellectual vigour of scholasticism in this
whole area of thought was sapped when the outcome of the Church
Councils put an end to all attempts at constitutional reform within the
Church and made nearly absolute the power of the pope, who, as the
ruler of the papal state in central Italy, was soon to be drawn into the
whirlpool of the politics of the Italian tyrant states. Nor were the con-
siderable achievements of fourteenth-century scholasticism in the natural
sciences followed by comparable results after the middle of the fifteenth
century. Life and teaching in the universities became characterised by lack
of originality and by sterile traditionalism 1 — the accusation which is so

1 After much debate, this is still the picture, as found for Oxford in H. Rashdall,
The Universities of Europe, ed. Powicke and Emden (1936), vol. m, pp. 270 f. ; for Paris,

5 »

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

often levelled by later humanists against the learning of the Middle Ages
as a whole.

By the fifteenth century it was true that the day of medieval knight-
hood had also passed. The military service of the vassal was nearly
obsolete; and the economic position of the landed noblemen, dependent
as it was on easy availability of agricultural labour, had been greatly
weakened by the destruction of a third or more of the European peasant
population through the Black Death and the lasting economic decline
that ravaged most countries in the fourteenth century. Yet it would be
erroneous to think that the foremost place on the European scene was
henceforth left to the bourgeoisie. The strengthening of monarchy in
building up thenew great European Powers created fresh opportunities for
the nobility, which, side by side with the burgher class, was indispensable
in the new armies and administrations, and moreover could provide splen-
dour to the princes’ entourage. The balance between burghers and noble-
men and between urban and chivalric culture, during the fifteenth century,
was largely to depend on the existence and the influence of central princely
courts ; the outcome was entirely different in each European country.

In terms of social and constitutional history, the greatest strides beyond
medieval feudal conditions were made, except for Italy, in the English
monarchy. The English knights had been the first to lose the status of an
armed military caste; in the course of the fifteenth century they merged
into a gentry no longer separated by a gulf from the commercial world of
the burgher class. They intermarried and socially intermingled with the
leading London merchant families, and in the House of Commons the
‘Knights of the Shire’ sat side by side with the burgesses from the
boroughs — a mark of social equality inconceivable in the meetings of
most continental estates. It would be wrong, however, to presume that,
in this association, the balance of influence was equal or even gradually
turned against the knightly element. Since the first decades of the fifteenth
century, a growing number of the smaller parliamentary boroughs re-
turned gentlemen to the Commons, instead of the merchants or members of
the burgess class proper who had been sent during the fourteenth century;
the social composition of the English parliament was changing in favour,
not of the bourgeoisie, but of the gentry until, by the time of Elizabeth,
there were four gentlemen to every townsman among the members.

We find a corresp onding survival and even recrudescence of the traditions
of gentility in the cultural life of fifteenth-century England. As Dr G. M.
Trevelyan characterises the situation: if Chaucer’s ghost had returned to

in A. Renaudet, Pririforme et Humanisme d Paris (2nd ed. 1953), pp. 98 ff., 1 58 f. ; for
the German universities, in G. Ritter, ‘Via antiqua und via moderna auf den deutschen
Universit&ten des XV. Jahrhunderts’, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akad. der Wiss.
Philos.-Hist. Klasse, 1922, Abh. 7, pp. 95-9, 1 13-15.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

the English scene in the late fifteenth century, he would have felt entirely
at home although a century had passed. No fundamentally new ideas or
literary tastes had emerged; the works of Chaucer were still read as if they
had been contemporary productions. One might go even farther and
judge that English literature had not yet fully assimilated Chaucer’s best
achievements. His had been a development in taste and interest from the
days when he translated into English the Roman de la Rose and acclimat-
ised in England the allegorical style of French knightly love poetry, to the
time of the fresh realism of his Canterbury Tales. Literary production in
fifteenth-century England did include a realistic trend, expressing itself
chiefly in satirical and didactic writings; but the elaborate literary works
which expressed the intellectual climate of the period between 1400 and
1500 rather continued the ‘aureate diction’ of the allegoric and chivalrous
love-poetry of the early Chaucer. The favourite subject-matter remained
the knightly epic which transformed past history into a web of legendary
tales of the descent of England’s knighthood from Troy, Rome, and the
‘Round Table’ of King Arthur.

To be sure, the century saw significant innovations and inventions. New
schools were founded — among them Eton and Winchester — where the
descendants of gentle and even noble families were educated along with
the best talent from lower circles; as elsewhere in Europe, the period was
at hand when a scholarly education became a normal part of the pre-
paration for the man of the world. For the first time, letter writing was
common in the higher strata of lay society. But wherever, as in the corres-
pondence of the Pastons (yeoman farmers who rose into the gentry),
these letters allow us to observe prevailing cultural trends, we find, besides
an active interest and participation in tournaments, that the medieval book-
shelf was yet unchanged, comprising epics of knightly exploits, some
religious works, and a few translations (not the original texts) of ancient
authors. The coming of the printed book did not immediately produce
substantial changes in taste and outlook. When William Caxton, after a
long life as a London merchant and representative of English commercial
interests in the Low Countries, was engaged (during the 1470’s and 1480’s)
in running the press which for England initiated the era of printing, the
core of his book production, in addition to Chaucer’s works, was the
publication, in English versions, of the vast literature on the knights of
Troy, Greece, Rome, Charlemagne, and King Arthur, the reading-matter
at late medieval courts. In translating and publishing a French work
entitled The Order of Chivalry or Knighthood, Caxton, mouthpiece of
the sentiments of the London merchant patriciate, did not hesitate to
comment that this was a timely book to remind forgetful England of the
rules accepted in all periods of the past when English knights were known
for true chivalry — especially in the memorable days of King Arthur’s,
Tristan’s, and Percivale’s noble ‘manhood, courtesy and gentilness’.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The historiography of fifteenth-century England proves that a glorified
knightly past was indeed the spiritual world in which the contemporaries
of Caxton lived. To be sure, instead of clerics writing in Latin, wealthy
merchants now composed English chronicles of their cities, especially in
London ; and, as a consequence, many everyday events from the burgher’s
life were realistically observed and recorded in every small detail. But if
the composition of the vernacular London Chronicles emancipated the
burgher from his dependence on clerical writers, this change did not mean
emancipation from the standards and prejudices imposed by the predomi-
nance of chivalrous culture. Among the scenes of city life found in the
London Chronicles, none are described with greater zest than knightly
tournaments and royal processions in the town ; and no attempt is made
as yet to look beyond external facts and pageantry, to consider causes and
effects, the value of sources, the need for selection and proportion — the
features of the historiography which was to rise in the sixteenth century.
In general historical works, such as the Chronicles of England published in
final form in 1480, the background remains the fantastic tale, as told by
Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, about Brutus, grandson of
Aeneas, who after his victories over aboriginal giants founded the British
kingdom; the chivalrous deeds of King Arthur and the knights of his
Round Table are still accepted as historical facts and used as yardsticks in
all judgments on past and present. These deeds were also the theme of the
greatest imaginative work of fifteenth-century England, Malory’s Morte
d’ Arthur. When Caxton first published it in print, he urged his readers to
believe that the stories of Arthur were not mere fiction ; Malory’s descrip-
tions, he said, had given a glorified account of the greatest age in England’s
history.

This inability and unwillingness to break away from the world of medi-
eval chivalry must be explained largely by social facts. From the four-
teenth to the end of the fifteenth century, England, like many parts of
Europe, passed through an extended period of economic stagnation.
Although this was the time which saw the emergence of the figure of the
clothier, the woollen manufacturer who built up capitalistic industry in a
country-side unhampered by medieval city-guild regulations, the output
of the English cloth industry remained almost unchanged until the great
upsurge of England’s economic life in the course of the Tudor era; the
day of the industrial middle class still lay far in the future. The only social
group of the bourgeoisie whose impact on culture could be significant in
the fifteenth century was the London wholesale merchant class, which
wielded the government of England’s only metropolitan city and controlled
her trade with the Continent. But the exclusive and privileged ‘livery
companies ’ of these merchants were by their nature less a harbinger of
modern society than an epilogue to the history of medieval merchant
guilds; nor did they represent a group keenly aware of its differences from

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

the nobility, but rather formed a social stratum regularly passing into
the landed gentry by intermarriage. Having acquired property in the
country, the merchants merged into a half-feudal environment. Even as
late as the time of Elizabeth, gentlemen of social and political importance
led a seignorial existence in their counties, surrounded by a crowd of
retainers, and in their turn gathering round a patron in the higher nobility.
If by that time the culture of the gentry and the nobility had largely out-
grown the medieval chivalrous tradition, in many respects this was due
to the influence of the new aristocratic education which had first flowered
at the Italian courts.

It was not until the end of the fifteenth century, however, that any
serious contacts between England and Renaissance Italy were made. Up
to then, journeys to Italy had not formed a part of the education of the
sons of the gentry or of the London merchant aristocracy. Before 1490,
English travellers to Italy had been as a rule clergy, or officials travelling
in the king’s service. Although these men occasionally acted as pioneers
in that they brought home rare humanistic manuscripts and a love for
the new learning, humanism was not to them a new education of man or a
new world of ideas. On returning to England, they did not found new
intellectual movements, or groups opposed to scholasticism. As a con-
sequence, in spite of the stimulus of such pioneers, and in spite of the
patronage of individual members of the English high nobility who per-
suaded some Italian humanists to come to England to serve as secretaries
or teachers, the only tangible result was the addition of a substantial num-
ber of humanistic manuscripts to English libraries and the inclusion of
some Greek in the curriculum of the old schools and universities.

Before humanism could mean more to late medieval England, the
growth of humanism in Italy had to reach the stage where the classicists’
enthusiasm for ancient literature and art was balanced by renewed thoughts
of religion, and by endeavours to reconcile the classical legacy with the
Christian tradition. After Lorenzo Valla, the great Roman humanist, had
given the first example of a critical revision of the text of the New Testa-
ment, it was in the school of Neoplatonic philosophy revived in Florence
that Italian scholars, foremost among them Marsilio Ficino and Pico della
Mirandola, drawing upon the religious literature of classical antiquity, set
to work upon a new theology in a half-classical and half-scholastic frame-
work — a deepening of religious interest in Florence that was enhanced
when the preaching of Savonarola for a while after 1490 caused a wide-
spread estrangement from the secularism of the early Renaissance. It
was in this religious-minded phase of the Renaissance that English scholar-
ship established contacts with Italy. After a two-year visit to Italy, John
Colet delivered in Oxford, from 1496 onward, public lectures on the
epistles of St Paul that represented a decisive break with the methods of
scholastic learning. Along paths also followed by Ficino in those years,

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Paul’s teaching and missionary work was here interpreted historically
against the background of the pagan and early Christian period. As was
the case with Ficino, Colet’s was a new perspicacity in psychological in-
sight and an understanding springing from a loving intimacy with the
human personality of Paul as a biblical teacher. In his exegesis of Paul’s
doctrine Colet was guided by a simple kind of piety and a confidence that
faith in divine grace and the right spirit were of greater account than any
letter or rite. From this confidence sprang a striking unconcern for most
of the abstruse problems of the theology of the schoolmen. 1

Once this first bridge to the intellectual world of Renaissance Italy had
been built, humanism in England quickly became a movement which
could spread beyond the walls of the universities. In metropolitan London,
owing to Colet and Thomas More, there formed a circle of men whose
minds, having been shaped by the new religious learning, were soon
spurred on to social and political concerns, until after the 1520’s, in the
latter part of Henry VIII’s reign, Renaissance ideas on history and politics,
on social problems and human conduct, were reaching England in an un-
interrupted stream. When shortly after 1500 an Italian humanist residing
in England, Polydore Vergil, detected the fantastic note of medieval
legend in the accepted accounts of Brutus and King Arthur, and recon-
structed the history of England in humanist fashion, his criticism was still
greeted with indignation and unbelief. Yet the seeds of doubt once sown
would unfold, and from the 1530’s onward the world of Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth was gradually replaced by the historical vistas created by the
Renaissance in Italy.

Across the Channel, the fifteenth-century balance between monarchy,
nobility, and bourgeoisie had been different. The performance of monarchy
in promoting political integration was more spectacular in the French-
speaking countries than anywhere else in fifteenth-century Europe. In the
darkest hours of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and during the sub-
sequent period of reconstruction, the Crown had been the rallying point
and the salvation of France ; similarly, the State of the dukes of Burgundy
was a creation solely of the efforts of a younger branch of the French
royal house. In France, royal power was already becoming absolute;

1 That Colet’s studies were influenced by Ficino is obvious from the similarity of their
approaches and has been accepted as a fact ever since F. Seebohm’s The Oxford Reformers
(1867). However, as very little is known about the details of Colet’s Italian journey,
evidence of personal relations between the two men has been lacking. Direct contacts have
now been proved by the discovery of two intimate letters of Ficino to Colet: see R. Marcel,
Bibliothique d'Hum. et Renaiss. xrv (1952), pp. I22f. Another difficulty in inquiries about
Colet’s debt to Ficino is the late date of Ficino’s commentary on Paul’s epistles — between
1496 and 1499, according to P. O. Kristeller’s Supplementum Ficinianum (1937), vol. 1,
p. lxxxii. But since the commentary had been preceded by lectures, its date is no obstacle
to the assumption that Ficino was already engaged in his biblical studies, or was even giving
his lectures, at the time when Colet stayed at Florence.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

the £tats Generaux had practically lost the right of consent in matters of
taxation, and the supreme judicial court, the Parlement of Paris, exerted
only occasional checks on the omnipotence of the king. If royal centralised
administration could not yet be extended to every province of the vast
kingdom, its place in Orleans and Anjou, Brittany and Burgundy was
taken by the princely courts and regional administrations of branch lines
of the royal family, or of members of the high nobility. The work of re-
construction carried out by king and princes in the second half of the
fifteenth century depended on the co-operation not only of the nobility
but also of the bourgeoisie. Yet, although royal policy highly favoured
the industry and commerce of the towns, the urban element in France was
not so much a respected ally as a submissive favourite, closely supervised
by royal officials. The leading ranks of the townsmen did not represent a
commercial or industrial class with a national horizon; they rather formed
wealthy local aristocracies with merely provincial interests. Their most
successful elements were eager to purchase landed estates and associate
themselves with the provincial noblemen. At the French courts, therefore,
the forms of social life and the spirit of literature and art remained almost
untouched by urban influences; the legacy of medieval chivalry continued
to be the dominating factor.

To be sure, within the framework of the princely courts we meet with
still another element of cultural significance. Studies of the classical
authors had always flourished among the clerks in the French chancery,
and in these circles, during the later Middle Ages, there existed a strong
affinity of mind with the Latin classicism of Italian humanists. French-
men, like Italians, spoke a Romance language, and interest in surviving
Latin literature had spread more widely in medieval France than in any
other European country, including Italy before the coming of Petrarch.
In the fourteenth century, the residence of the Papal Curia at Avignon
on the banks of the Rhone had brought the two countries into close
intellectual contact; Petrarch had spent his formative years in a mixed
Italian-French environment at Avignon, and during the first part of
his life may have found better classical texts and information among
his French friends than in his native Italy. In the first two generations
after Petrarch (roughly the years 1360-1420) we find the typical social life
of humanists among the secretaries of the royal chancery: classical
manuscripts were eagerly transcribed ; letters and poems imitating ancient
models were exchanged. But after the 1430’s these exercises declined,
apparently leaving no permanent effects. 1 The explanation is not far to
seek. A chiefly rhetorical trend of studies, confined to the narrow world

1 See A. Covilie, Gontier et Pierre Col et /’ Hurrumisme en France au temps de Charles VI
(1934), esp. pp. 229-34. The decline of this early French humanism after 1430 has been
disputed by F. Simone in Convivium (Turin, 1951), pp. 189, i93fif., for reasons which in the
present writer’s opinion are not strong enough to destroy the picture drawn by Covilie.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

of the chanceries and lacking serious significance for contemporaneous
French learning or for the values of those who were socially important,
could not result in anything comparable to the organic development of
Italian humanism.

Although a mature humanistic movement could not develop on so
slender a basis, the long influence of classical studies on France, as
well as the proximity of Italy, caused interest in some favourite ancient
authors to hold its own in the culture of the French courts. From the
middle of the fourteenth century, the library of the kings added to its
treasures of religious and chivalrous literature a number of manuscripts of
Greek and Roman works translated into French at royal request. Livy’s
Roman history, Cicero On Old Age and On Friendship, as well as the
Aristotelian Ethics, Politics, and Economics , thus became available to
courtiers ignorant of Latin and Greek ; there were also some products of
the early Italian humanists, especially Petrarch and Boccaccio. But these
French versions made for princely libraries were very different from
humanist translations bent on reproducing the exact text, the literary form
and the historical atmosphere of the translated works; they were rather
paraphrases and adaptations made up in such a way that the contents
could be readily understood and borrowed as subject-matter by readers
and writers eager to find an antidote against the decay of present-day
chivalry in the hardiness, patriotism, and warrior virtues of the Roman
‘knights’. At the court of Burgundy, cultural centre of the French-
speaking countries in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the legendary
history of the knighthood of ancient Troy, Greece, and Rome became the
framework of all ideas on conduct, education, and even politics. Ducal
secretaries collected in beautifully illuminated manuscripts all available
sources on Alexander the Great, translations of the ancient historical
accounts and medieval tales alike; the fabulous splendours of Alexander’s
court in war and peace served as a model and reflected image of social
life at the Burgundian court. The knightly world of King Arthur’s Round
Table, still seen through the eyes of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and every
available bit of information on Troy, whether wholly fictitious or from an
ancient source, remained accepted parts of the picture of the past. Duke
Philip the Good personally took a hand in the preparation of the Hystoires
de Troye, the most splendid manuscript book among these collections; it
was one of the continental works on chivalry later translated into English
and published by Caxton.

In this atmosphere, ancient elements and Italian influences proved
powerless to modify traditional ideals and the conduct of life. In the
earlier development of chivalry, the knightly orders, the crusades, and the
rise of the love-poetry of the minstrel had been the crowning events ; they
had sprung naturally from the necessities of medieval conditions. Now
these memories of the past were kept alive by being turned into parts of an

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

elaborate system and ceremonial at the courts. The knightly orders of the
Middle Ages had been free associations of knights devoted to the fight for
Christianity in the East. In the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth
centuries new knightly orders appeared, creations of the new monarchies
which, with the help of the old chivalrous symbols and social forms, en-
deavoured to integrate the nobility of many far-flung provinces into the
new State and provide new outlets in the princely service for the ambitions
of noblemen. The first of these courtly orders had been the English Order
of the Garter; it was followed by the Burgundian Order of the Golden
Fleece, the most magnificent and sumptuous of these foundations, con-
tinued as a Spanish institution after the union of the Low Countries with
Spain. The rise of a French counterpart founded by Louis XI, the Ordre
de Saint-Michel, and the subsequent creation of similar orders in countries
as distant from each other as Savoy, Denmark, and Hungary shows the
significance of the Burgundian example for courtly society all over Europe.

In these new orders, the pomp and distinction of the ceremonial were
intended to keep aloft the old standards of caste and honour. At least in
Burgundy, the memory even of the crusades continued to play a vivid
part. Plans for a new crusade were widely made in Europe after the
Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453; in Renaissance Italy the
humanist pope, Pius II, spent all his energies and resources on futile
efforts. In the atmosphere of Burgundy the plans for the crusade assumed
the appearance of a thrilling courtly event— a fascinating chapter to be
added to the old epic of chivalry. At the end of a ducal banquet in 1454,
famed in the annals of the period for its luxury, a symbolic figure repre-
senting the Church in her humiliation appeared praying for salvation from
the infidels ; whereupon the duke, in a scene meant to revive the spirit of
knightly valour, vowed not only his personal participation in a crusade, but
even his readiness for single combat with the sultan — an oath outdone by
many of the vows of the knights of the Golden Fleece. Chivalrous love
and poetry, too, were turned into a planned and organised institution at
the French courts. From the end of the fourteenth century, cours d' amour
were set up among the courtiers, who in formal meetings judged delicate
problems of chivalrous behaviour and love, and recited the poems they
had composed in the traditional manner of knightly love-poetry. These
institutions were intended to shape the minds of all the members of the
court in the same mould, from the prince down to his secretaries of
bourgeois descent; they all were joined together, and yet carefully differen-
tiated one from the other, in a solemn hierarchy of princes, grands conser-
vateurs, ministers, counsellors, secretaries, and many other distinct grades,
of the cour amoureuse.

This background readily explains the spirit of the Rhitoriqueurs, the
school which in the fifteenth century dominated French and Burgundian
literature — such traits as the ostentatious rhetoric and the scorn of these

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

writers for the vulgar world below the level of nobility; their delight in
archaic forms; their clinging to the allegories and symbols of medieval
poetry; and their deep pessimism and melancholy caused by the know-
ledge that knighthood and chivalrous love, outside the beautiful conven-
tions of the courts, were everywhere contradicted by the realities of life. 1
There were, it is true, a few great writers of the fifteenth century who, for
various reasons, were able to break loose from the pervasive influence of
the school of the Rhetoriqueurs ; in their works realistic observation and
psychology gained more ample scope and produced masterpieces of
literature. But since the social structure of the period so strongly favoured
adherence to the outlook and the conventions of the age of chivalry, we
find no literary schools determinedly opposing the dominant trend; even
masters in the presentation of realistic detail did not develop into conscious
rebels against the traditional ways, or become pioneers of the tendencies
of the Renaissance. A great French poet of the period, Francois Villon,
known for his blunt self-revelation, could free himself from many con-
formities with his time only because he led the erratic life of a vagabond;
in his attitude to life and society he was a late successor of the wander-
ing scholars of the early Middle Ages rather than a precursor of the
Renaissance. Another well-known writer, Antoine de la Sale, who has
been called one of the pioneers of the modem novel, shows that the realism
and psychological experience of the period could well result in a satirical
critique of chivalry; but his intention remained to castigate abuses and
human frailties, not to propose new ways. Although La Sale had seen
humanistic Italy, his hero’s education, of which he gives so masterly an
analysis, remains the training of a young knight through tournaments
and courtly love.

In historical writing, realism and psychological penetration reached
toward the end of the century a climax with Philippe de Commynes, the
historiographer of Louis XI. In Commynes, condemnation of chivalry as
an antiquated illusion is definite; he echoes in this attitude the spirit of
Louis XTs reign (1461-83), when for a while sober concern for the political
and economic reconstruction of France had overshadowed the royal
patronage of traditional culture. In a measure, Commynes’s ruthless
probing into human motives, his maxim that success alone, not honour,
counts in politics, and his pessimistic view of human nature are northern
parallels to the thought of his younger Italian contemporary, Machiavelli.
Yet there remains an important difference. In Commynes’s historiography,
these fruits of fifteenth-century realism are not used for a new causal
theory in interpreting historical and political life — the ultimate attainment

1 For the preceding and following characterisationsofBurgundianculture.cf.J. Huizinga’s
Der Herbsl des Mittelalters (6th ed. 1952; Engl, version. The Waning of the Middle Ages
(1924)), passim, and his Im Bonn der Geschichte (1943), pp. 326-36: for the French
parallels, R. L. Kilgour, The Decline of Chivalry as shown in the French literature of the
late Middle Ages (1937).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

of Machiavelli and the Italian Renaissance. The framework in which
Commynes’s discerning description of detail is placed remains a naive
attribution of the causes of wars and defeats, of all historical changes, to
divine intention to punish or educate. It is in the light of observations
like these that the era of Louis XI falls into historical place. The realistic
tendencies of his reign did not result in any permanent changes in the life
of the French court and the direction of the royal patronage. Except
for the modifications gradually brought about by Italian influence, the
French court of the Renaissance was to continue in the chivalrous tradi-
tions of the court of the fifteenth century. And even in Louis XI’s own
reign one notes that among the few measures of the cool diplomat with
a cultural bearing there was, as we have seen, the foundation of one of
the new courtly orders. Moreover, when the history of France was written
by Louis’s secretaries, these Grandes Chroniques de France embodied all
the legendary medieval traditions which were to give way to a new type
of historiography only in the course of the sixteenth century, after the
historical criticism of the humanists had done its work.

In the Burgundian area, a unique cultural role devolved upon the bour-
geoisie of the Flemish and Brabantine cities. In an account of the art of
the fifteenth century, no region north of the Alps would be represented
by so many leading names as Flanders and Brabant. Indeed, the story of
the growth of sensitivity to nature and the realisation of human indi-
viduality in fifteenth-century painting is to a large extent the story of the
Flemish school, beginning with Hubert and Jan van Eyck. In a chapter
on the rise of the new spirit in plastic art, the names of the greatest pioneer,
Claus Sluter, and many of his followers would take us again to Flanders-
Brabant or to the neighbouring regions. Yet, to determine the historical
place of these attainments in art, we must remember also some other
facts. The new trend did not originate as a genuine creation of the cities
of the Low Countries ; even the paintings of the ‘ Flemish school ’ were not
strictly products of workshops in Flemish towns, executed in an urban
atmosphere to suit the taste of bourgeois patricians. The social background
of the art of the Low Countries was different from that of the art of the
early Italian Quattrocento which arose in the civic domain of Florence and
other Tuscan city-states. In Flemish-Burgundian art, the seeds were sown
in an urban milieu, but the growth took place in the world of the dukes of
Burgundy. Jan van Eyck and most of the other leading painters and
sculptors lived, and created many of their major works, in the employment
of the chivalrous ducal court, surrounded by its princely atmosphere.
Their sensitiveness for minute detail in portraying man and scenery had
been anticipated largely not in any urban art, but in the work of the
miniaturists of the precious manuscripts produced for the libraries of the
French kings and princes of the fourteenth century. In many respects the
character of these medieval surroundings left its mark on the realism of the

1 6l KCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Flemish school. As in the historiography of Commynes, the skill achieved
in reproducing realistic detail was not matched by the power of organis-
ation according to rules and laws derived from nature; the total view of
the world and man’s place in it remained religious, spiritual, and symbolic
in the medieval manner. As a consequence, the still imperfect grasp by
the Flemish artists of the human organism and of perspective did not
develop into a systematic, scientific study of anatomy and optics— an
indispensable contribution of the art to the mind of the Renaissance —
as we find it in Italy.

The influence of the Burgundian court made itself strongly felt even
inside the walls of the Flemish cities. The finely adorned town halls of
Ghent, Bruges, Louvain, and other cities, built at the time, have, as a recent
historian of Burgundian culture has said, an appearance more of jeweller’s
work than architecture; they resemble graceful shrines for relics, executed
in the ornamental style characteristic of the ducal court. 1 Nothing could
be farther removed from the organic simplicity which distinguishes the
simultaneous architecture of the early Italian Renaissance. As for literature
and poetry, the cities of Artois, Flanders, and Brabant possessed a singular
type of institution: the chambres de rhdtorique ( Rederijkerskamers in the
Germanic-speaking provinces), a secularised sequel to the medieval as-
sociations for the performance of religious miracle plays. The chambres
in the fifteenth century served two major purposes : the training of a troupe
for the performance of plays — now often moral-allegorical in content —
and the constant exercise of all members in the ‘art of rhetoric’. For
education in this art, meetings were held in formal sessions, with a strict
social ceremonial, where everyone present, in a prescribed time, had to
compose and recite compositions in verse on a common theme assigned
by the chairman, often a high-ranking member of the Burgundian nobility.
With this emphasis on etiquette and the teachable elements of literary
expression, the chambres were a bourgeois counterpart to the coursd' amour
of the nobility; in both institutions the preservation of socially accepted
forms and traditions far outweighed in value individual originality. A
few generations later, during the sixteenth century, the chambres were to
provide a social forum for the dissemination of new ideas, first of Erasmian
humanism, and subsequently, in the northern provinces of the Nether-
lands, of the Reformation. But to discover the channels through which
new intellectual forces first gradually spread, from the latter half of the
fifteenth century onwards, we must turn our attention away from the
cities of Flanders and Brabant, to cultural centres outside the sphere of
Burgundy.

There were in continental western and central Europe three focal points,
or areas, that kept aloof from the overpowering influence of the French
1 J. Huizinga, Im Bam, p. 332.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

and Burgundian courts. One was the University of Paris, the old inter-
national meeting place of European scholars. There we observe conditions
which closely resemble the course of the development in the universities
of England. In spite of France’s proximity to Italy, the Parisian schoolmen
scorned serious Italian influences and any major changes in their curricu-
lum until the last decades of the fifteenth century. True, after 1450 a few
Italian humanists had been admitted by the faculty of arts as teachers of
Greek ; some humanistic text-books had replaced medieval Latin grammars ;
and the Parisian printing presses, from their inception in 1470, produced
some books of humanist interest. But these were minor innovations which
did not influence the trend of studies in any of the faculties; the centre of
the life of the university remained the bitter controversies between the
schools of Aquinas, Scotus, and Occam, and the discussions, varying but
little, of the traditional logical and metaphysical problems. Students who
searched for more nourishing food in their spiritual education found
satisfaction in reading the works of the late-medieval mystics. In Paris,
as in Oxford, a cool reserve towards Italian humanism did not change
until the latter had begun to apply the interpretative methods of classical
scholarship to the Scriptures and explore humanist avenues for theology
by turning attention to the mystical and religious elements in the legacy
of antiquity. In Paris, too, the ice was broken about the middle of the last
decade of the fifteenth century. Like Colet in Oxford, Lefevre d’Etaples
(Faber Stapulensis) in Paris at that time brought home from a journey to
Italy the enthusiasm for a new learning which offered at once a training
in the methods of classical scholarship, an eager interest in Plato and Neo-
platonism, a fresh theological start, and the warmth of a new piety pene-
trating all studies. Lefevre differed from Colet only in that the aspect of
Florentine Neoplatonism chiefly grasped by him was not the interest in
the epistles of St Paul, but the attention paid by Ficino and Pico della
Mirandola to the ancient works on mysticism and occult sciences, on
astrology and the symbolism of names — a late-classical corpus of writings
which allowed a glimpse of pre-Christian piety. The interest in this body
of literature was to become almost as influential as was the humanist
interest in the Scriptures.

As for the later course of the relations between the French humanist
movement and Renaissance Italy, in France as in England it was only
after these contacts in religious sentiment and theological scholarship had
been made that Italian humanism was embraced as a new attitude toward
contemporary life and toward the traditions of the past. Even then the
change did not come about suddenly. When Paolo Emilio, an Italian
humanist in the employ of the French king, writing the early history of
France about 1500, rejected the legend of the Trojan origin of the knights
of France, the results of his scholarship failed to impress French writers.
Not until the generation of Jean Bodin, in the second half of the sixteenth

63 7 -*

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

century, did the historical criticism of the Renaissance definitely begin to
do away with the fantastic world of French knightly legend.

The second focal area outside the sway of French-Burgundian courtly
culture was the galaxy of towns on the eastern flank of Brabant-Flanders
and Burgundy, spread through the vast valley of the Rhine from its
northern mouths in the lands around the Zuider Zee to Switzerland in the
south. Compared with the phenomenal concentration of the cloth industry
and international trade in Ghent and Ypres, Brussels and Antwerp, this
eastern area was more remote and provincial, of moderate wealth, and
the home of the greatest mystics in the fourteenth century ; in the fifteenth,
it saw the spread of a pietist movement, the Devotio moderna, which
during the preceding century had originated in the quiet districts between
the Rhine and the Zuider Zee. Among the most interesting fruits of this
‘new devotion’ were the ‘Brethren of the Common Life’, associations of
men (occasionally also of women) who, though not taking irrevocable
monastic vows, gave up their private property and lived a chaste and
strictly regulated life in common houses, devoting each waking hour to
divine service, labour, reading, and preaching of sermons, according to a
prescribed schedule, the common meals being accompanied by readings
from the Scriptures. Judged from the ascetic discipline and intention of
this life, it had few features which distinguished it from life in a monastery ;
occasionally members joined a convent of the Windesheim Congrega-
tion of reformed Augustinian Canons, another reflection of the ‘new
devotion’. Yet even though the Brethren lived in the shadow of the
monastery, the existence of associations of men who laid down their own
rules for religious life without seeking guidance and supervision by any
of the established orders was something new ; and the consequences were
felt in the Brethren’s attitude towards church, theology, and education.
Their confidence that a spiritual discipline similar to that of the monk was
possible without binding vows, combined with their emphasis on conduct,
produced a tendency to value character and piety more highly than strict
adherence to rite and doctrine. To a degree, the brotherhood had this
tendency in common with the mystics of the fourteenth century, but unlike
them were no longer seeking the essential nourishment for the soul in
mystic rapture ; in the regulated life of brotherhood houses, the spirit was
to be fortified by a persistent and methodical reading of the Scriptures and
of devotional works of a practical educational nature. The book and the
common library, therefore, were the centre of life in the houses; and even
the manual labour prescribed for certain hours of day was preferably done
by making careful and reliable copies of manuscripts, the sale of which
would contribute to the expenses of the common life and, at the same time,
help to disseminate the books in which the Brethren had found their
spiritual guides.

To be sure, the books thus read and circulated by the Brethren had

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

little in common with the intellectual interests of humanism. Nevertheless,
the Brethren’s dislike of abstruse theological discussions had some re-
semblance to the humanists’ opposition to the intellectual subtlety of
scholasticism ; their love of books that gave spiritual and moral guidance
could serve as a bridge to the humanists’ love of classical poets and moralists
who educate the reader’s mind; and their insistence on honesty and faith-
fulness as an aim in manuscript copying could be a preparation for the
humanists’ philological accuracy in the reconstruction of ancient texts.
This is not to say that the Brethren developed into humanists or on their
own account produced any new secular culture; the intellectual indepen-
dence and the experience of life needed for the growth of humanistic
scholarship would have been difficult to find in these brotherhood houses.
But the affinity to some essential aspects of humanism went far enough
for the Brethren to recognise in humanist pedagogy something of their
own intentions, and readily associate themselves with schools run by men
who had pursued studies in Italy, or had elsewhere made contact with
humanism. In such cases, the Brethren founded and supervised dormi-
tories connected with their houses, for the pupils of the school; they thus
were able to imbue the pupils’ lives with their religious earnestness and
methodical discipline. Indeed, so widely did they engage in this work of
educational assistance that the Netherlands, Brabant, and Flanders, and
even large parts of Germany, were eventually strewn with humanist
schools whose unusual size and pedagogical excellence largely derived
from the co-operation of a brotherhood house and the availability of
dormitories under the Brethren’s supervision.

As early as the beginning of the fifteenth century we find in Nicholas
of Cusa a great philosopher whose mind was formed first by an education
in the school connected with the Brethren at Deventer near the Zuider
Zee, and afterwards by university studies at Heidelberg and in Italy; out
of the marriage of northern and southern elements in Nicholas’s thought
emerged the first philosophy in which the spirituality of mysticism and
of the * new devotion ’ was fused with the mind of the Italian Renaissance.
During the last decades of the fifteenth century, the leading figure bred in
the atmosphere of the Netherlands was Erasmus. He did not visit Italy
in his formative years, but he had as a boy in the school at Deventer found
himself under the twofold influence of the Brethren and of teachers in-
fluenced by Italian humanism. Early in his life, he met Colet in Oxford.
By this meeting the humanism of the Low Countries, already tinged with
the spirituality and the biblical interest of the Brethren, was put in con-
tact with the new theology and approach to the epistles of St Paul which
Colet, only a few years earlier, had brought home from Italy and continued
in England. Thus at the cross-roads of various northern and southern
influences there emerged a biblical humanism, a school of studies which
gained a foothold also at Paris, where Lefevre became a great biblical

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

scholar during his later years. Between 1500 and 1520, under Erasmus’s
leadership, biblical humanism was to be the most significant trend of
h umanis m outside Italy.

Spreading to the Upper Rhine and south Germany, Erasmian and
biblical humanism entered into a region which had been in close contact
with Italy for several generations — the third major area of important
cultural developments north of the Alps outside the sphere of the French
and Burgundian courts. This area, too, had a marked urban character.
South Germany, indeed Germany as a whole, had not produced a cen-
tralising monarchy; and the courts — or centres of administration — of the
rising territorial states were still too provincial in outlook and composition
to exert a decisive influence on German culture. The German lower
nobility found little opportunity in princely service during the fifteenth
century. It was not until the second half of the sixteenth century that the
German noblemen as such began to play a predominant political and
cultural role in the greater states ; from then on the glamorous life of the
nobility of the western courts became an object for imitation at every
princely seat.

In the two centuries from 1350 to 1550 many factors had conspired in
favour of the German cities and urban classes. In industry and commerce
the baneful effects of the fourteenth-century epidemics were more than
counterbalanced by the advantages of the country’s geographic position.
From the late fourteenth century onwards, the progress of long-distance
inland transportation linked more and more of the east-European
countries in inter-European commerce. Large eastern resources of food
and raw materials supplied a substitute for German agricultural losses
caused by the depopulation of the Black Death. The need for industrial
goods to be used in exchange resulted in a rapid growth of new handi-
crafts and industries in the German cities ; at the same time new mines
were opened, with the consequent establishment of highly-skilled metal
arts and crafts. In addition, the German cities had not yet ceased to be
the centre of a network of trade spreading between England and the
Scandinavian countries to the north and Italy to the south. 1

German life in the fifteenth century, therefore, was characterised by a
sharp contrast between the vigour of countless small communities —
among them many half-independent imperial towns — and the weakness
of all uniting and integrating forces that might have fused these teeming
energies on a regional, if not national, level. The political consequences
were strife among the cities and territorial states, revolutionary stirrings

1 For German fifteenth-century economic history, many aspects of which still defy
generalisation, cf. the chapter on 'the pre-eminence of the city’ in F. Liitge’s Deutsche
Sozial- und Wirtschaflsgeschichte (1952), pp. 142 fF. ; on the role of the German nobility,
ibid. pp. 149 f.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

in many social groups, and a dissatisfaction with the out-dated medieval
structure of the Empire. In sculpture and painting, no modem school
comparable to that of Flanders in singleness of purpose and freedom from
provincialism emerged ; but a new grasp of the material substance of things,
and the growing ability to represent human character realistically, ap-
peared in the art of many German provinces and towns, independently
producing counterparts to the Flemish achievements. In literature
and intellectual culture, too, the lack of centres with more than merely
local influence was fatal to the rise of broad, let alone national, trends.
But because there was so little courtly life to uphold medieval conventions
and traditions, the German scholar and writer, in many provincial places,
had an open mind and looked for new discoveries in the humanistic
world beyond the Alps long before western scholars and writers.

In the southern parts of Germany, it early became customary for stu-
dents of jurisprudence and medicine, as well as for the young patricians
of Niimberg, Augsburg, and Ulm, to attend the universities of Bologna
and Padua, whence they might bring home the recent products of human-
istic literature. At the same time this literature continuously reached
south Germany through Italian visitors. During the earlier part of the
fifteenth century, the church councils of Constance and Basle had caused
a great number of Italian secretary-humanists to spend years on the
Upper Rhine; Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), one of the
most effective humanist writers of the century, who was at one time a
secretary in the imperial chancery, then played a vital role in the dissemi-
nation of new interests. Before the middle of the century, the German
public had received from his pen not only a vast Latin correspondence
and elaborate programmes for the studio humanitatis and the humanist
philosophy of life, but also a pioneer psychological novel and exemplary
descriptions of Germany’s geography and history. Thus educated in their
tastes, translators of Latin literature into the German vernacular soon
took an interest in the writings in which Italian humanists of the early
fifteenth century had first proposed the new ideas of humane studies and
civility, of human nature, of the role of women, of public and family life;
almost none of these pioneering works, made available in German by the
1470’s, became accessible to French, Burgundian, and English readers in
fifteenth-century translations. Equally swift among German writers was
the influence of the new historiography. A semi-humanist chronicle of the
city of Augsburg as early as 1456 repudiated the customary city legend
that the early settlers were descended from Trojan fugitives. Thirty years
later a similar criticism was applied to the history of Niimberg, and by
about 1500 the critical study of Germanic origins, based on data in
Caesar and Tacitus, and of the medieval history of Germany had become
a widely explored field among German scholars.

The acclimatisation of university instruction of a humanistic type was

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

easier in this atmosphere than at the old centres of scholasticism in Paris
and Oxford. New universities whose arts faculties showed definitely
humanistic interests were founded: the first, in 1460, at Basle where
the influence of Aeneas Sylvius coincided with the stimulus left by other
visitors to the council. Humanist beginnings such as these blended with
another new tendency. The mathematical and astronomical studies which
had flowered in the Occamist school of scholasticism during the fourteenth
century were early revitalised in this area of cross-fertilisation between
Italian influences and practical experimentation in the workshops of the
German industrial towns. It was in the University of Vienna, during the
1450’s and 1460’s, that Peuerbach and Regiomontanus initiated the asso-
ciation of humanist studies with mathematics, astronomy, and mechanics
that was to become an essential trait of the later Renaissance, particularly
in Germany. The great part which in Diirer’s day Niimberg was to play
in these fields of Renaissance science was prepared as early as the 1470’s
when Regiomontanus, through patrician patronage, received the obser-
vatory and the workshop he needed for his astronomical and mechanical
researches. By that time Niimberg, along with its leadership in many
other arts and crafts, had also established its great place in the new art of
printing with moveable types, invented on the middle Rhine by 1450.

Although the road to the Renaissance had been opened earlier in Ger-
many than in the western countries, one must, nevertheless, not overlook
the fact that those who travelled the new route were for a long time chiefly
students who had spent some of their formative years in Italy, or had made
contacts with Italians in south Germany; their influence remained re-
stricted to scattered places and small circles during the fifteenth century.
In Germany, as in the West, humanism did not take roots in the native
soil until, towards the end of the century, it became allied to the religious
interests without which no lasting effect on late-medieval lay society was
possible. In the time of Erasmus, the expectation that the new studies
would bring about a spiritual as well as cultural reform was crucial in
giving rise to the optimism with which men faced the great intellectual
changes of their own time and looked forward to the future. There had
been no trace of this optimism in German literature during the fifteenth
century, except in the small groups connected with Italy. German didactic
poetry of the fifteenth century reveals at every turn the fact that even in
Germany, where we find no magnificent courts still displaying knightly
conduct, new standards had not as yet sufficiently matured to compete
with the respect paid to the time-honoured virtues of the knight. Since
these virtues had all but disappeared in urban society, the critics, burghers
themselves, expressed the melancholy conviction that the world had be-
come old and disjointed and was heading towards demoralisation and
decay — a note sounding through all late-medieval literature. And just as
Renaissance optimism and faith in new values had not as yet emerged, so

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

Renaissance pride in originality and unconventionality was in the fifteenth
century still foreign to German urban culture. In the associations of the
Meistersinger — the counterpart among German artisans of the chambres
de rhitorique of the bourgeoisie of Flanders and Brabant — the tradi-
tionalism of late-medieval guild society decreed that no competing member
in reciting his poems could use a tune which was not ascribed to one of
the ‘twelve great masters’, the legendary authorities of the singers; to
try to go beyond the forms once fixed smacked of presumption. It is in
the humanistic milieu of Niimberg at the turn of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries that the singer’s right to individual creation was first
recognised ; soon a singer was called a master only after he had invented
at least one tune of his own. During the early sixteenth century, this
principle— proof that growing individualism was at last breaking down
traditionalism in all urban classes — became the rule for the German
Meistersinger in all German towns.

In every European country outside the Italian peninsula we have, then,
found a similar situation at the beginning of the last decade of the
fifteenth century. Everywhere— Spain, which space does not permit us to
include in this survey, would be a less pronounced example, but no ex-
ception — minds turned toward Italy. This contact of the north with the
south was made at the point where citizens and scholars in the northern
countries, having begun to free themselves from the traditions of scholas-
ticism and chivalric culture, searched for a type of education which was at
once humanist and religious; hence the key position, in the process, of
Florentine Neoplatonism, the phase of the Italian development in which
humanistic culture, more than in any other, seemed capable of providing
a religion-motivated approach to antiquity and a devout philosophy of
life. The European recourse to Italian civilisation coincided with the
invasion of Italy by French armies ; from then on the northern portion of
the peninsula was to be an annex alternately of the French and Habsburg
monarchies. Thus, from the 1490’s onward, Italy became an object of
incessant attention, not only for travelling clerics and scholars, but also
for the diplomats and courtiers of all the European countries ; and it was
soon realised that religious philosophy and the critical study of the Bible,
brought home from Italy by Christian humanists like Colet and Lefevre,
had been but one late phase of a much more diversified political, social,
and cultural development.

A major cause of the peculiar evolution of Italy had been the history of
her nobility. From the early Middle Ages, large parts of the peninsula
had not known the feudal separation of the burgher class from a knight-
hood monopolising political, military, and cultural leadership. At least
in northern and central Italy, where emperor and pope were the sole but
weak overlords, most cities at an early date had developed into city-states,

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

practically, if not legally, independent — the only republics in the western
world before the seventeenth century, except a few rural and city-state
cantons of Switzerland. The landed nobility had been forced to move into
the adjacent cities whose ruling commercial class in most metropolitan
centres, and especially in Florence, was engaged by the thirteenth century
in both long-distance trade and the manufacture of woollen cloth, Europe’s
earliest major export industry. Through this gathering of important
sections of the Italian nobility and the leading commercial and indus-
trial groups within the same city walls there was formed, earlier than
anywhere else in Europe, a relatively integrated civil society in which
the balance gradually swung away from the knightly element and the
chivalric tradition.

The love-poetry of the Provencal troubadours, when taken over and
adapted by this Italian town patriciate, began to lose its conventionality
and assumed a simpler, more personal, and more natural note; this was
the trend of Italian literature at the time of Dante, about 1300. By the
middle of the fourteenth century, we find in Italy a conscious reaction
against the form and content of chivalrous poetry as well as of scholastic
learning — a change of taste and judgment which gave to classicism, in the
humanist movement led by Petrarch, aggressive power. The cultural ideals
of the ancient Roman patriciate, as handed down in Cicero’s writings,
began to furnish a new standard ; Ciceronian humanitas became the watch-
word for an education which claimed to free man from social conventions
and professional narrowness by trying to make his conduct, speech and
writing a genuine expression of his own self, his moral and intellectual
individuality. In Virgil’s epic, it was thought, there was at hand a model of
poetry echoing simple human loyalties and passions and the Roman’s love
of his country — a national epic free from the bizarreness of the knightly
code which dominated medieval poetry. Livy seemed to fulfil a similar
function for historical literature, providing a standard for the dramatic
portrayal of the growth of a nation and showing, by contrast, how
barbarous was delight in external pomp and irrelevant detail.

Enjoyment and considerable knowledge of the ancient poets, orators,
historians, and moral philosophers had not been lacking in the Middle
Ages; their study had been widespread among French and English clergy-
men before the rise of scholasticism, especially during the twelfth century.
The novel element in Petrarch’s humanism was his singleness of mind in
using the Ciceronian idea of humanitas as a guide in the interpretation of
antiquity. In spending the larger part of his life at the courts of tyrants, who
by the middle of the fourteenth century had replaced republican govern-
ment in many cities of northern Italy, Petrarch did not become unfaithful
to his ideals. The dictator of the city-state, the signore, was essentially a
strong, self-made personality capable of attracting an entourage of unusual
men in politics and culture whom he befriended and with whom he could

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

have informal intercourse; hardly ever was he the centre of a ceremonial
built on courtly customs and the differences of caste. The intellectual
climate in the tyrant-state was, indeed, initially almost as congenial as that
of the city-republic to a type of culture that knew of only one form of
humane contact between man and man and of only one kind of liberal
education; and the triumph of Petrarch’s humanism greatly helped to
retard until late in the fifteenth century the slow, though eventually in-
evitable, transformation of the Italian tyrants’ seats into new centres of
courtly culture. During the greater part of the period stretching from
1400 to 1500 — the Quattrocento — and especially at its beginning. Renais-
sance humanists, building on the foundations laid by Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio, were busy creating a culture and literature intended as the
common property of educated men in all social classes — laymen as well
as clergy. In the famed boarding-schools of humanist educators like
Guarino da Verona in Ferrara and Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, the
same curriculum of classical studies and physical exercises was required
from every pupil, even from the sons of princes.

A corollary to the feeling that a new and more valuable culture had
replaced the medieval pattern was the changed perspective, in Quattrocento
works, of the historical past and of the relationship of the past to the
present. Through Dante and Petrarch — so it was argued — genuine poetry
and ancient wisdom had been ‘reborn’ after a death-like sleep of a
thousand years, just as true art had again risen as if from a grave; the
subsequent resurgence of the studia humanitatis, the recovery of some
major Latin works, among them Tacitus and Cicero’s letters, and the
access, facilitated by refugee scholars from Byzantium, to the authentic
texts of Greek literature, seemed to introduce an age which, if it did not
equal antiquity, marked the beginning of fresh achievements in all fields
of culture. It should be noted that this confidence grew in Renaissance
Italy at the very time when in those countries which still accepted the
code of chivalry we find widespread a melancholy feeling of decay.

To be sure, had the freedom of the city-state been replaced everywhere
in northern and central Italy by dictatorial signorie and all Italy become an
area of monarchic rule, the strongly urban and civic strain in Italian
culture could hardly have survived far into the Renaissance. But during
the two generations from 1390 to 1450, the bourgeois element in the Italian
republics — although the time of its greatest industrial power and pre-
dominance in European trade had then already passed — gained buoyancy
and prestige by the defence of city-state independence and civic freedom
in a crucial struggle with tyranny. At the close of the fourteenth century,
the strongest tyranny, that of the Visconti of Milan, had by incessant
expansion reached the point where it was threatening to transform
northern and central Italy into one absolute monarchy. If this had hap-
pened, Quattrocento Italy would not have become an area of great,

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

stimulating variety within small compass, a civilisation with a city-state
basis in some respects akin to the pattern of ancient Greece; and the
Italian Renaissance would not, by her own experience, have been uniquely
prepared for the historical rediscovery of the ancient world. Owing to a
determined Florentine-Venetian resistance, however, Milan by the middle
of the century was restricted to the region of Lombardy; and meanwhile
the republics of Florence and Venice had built up regional states of their
own while, as a consequence of the establishment of a balance of power, a
number of minor free cities and tyrannies had also managed to survive.
Upon these foundations there emerged in the second half of the fifteenth
century a system of five major states differing greatly from each other by
their histories and institutions (the republics of Venice and Florence, the
duchy of Milan, the kingdom of Naples, and the Papal States): the first
modern example of an interrelated family of states guided by the idea of
equilibrium through continual readjustment of the balance of power . 1

The political struggle of the early Quattrocento and the resultant pre-
servation of republican freedom side by side with tyranny left lasting
marks on humanistic thought. By studying the constitutional life of the
ancient city-states from Greek sources, now read in their original texts,
and by appraising against this background the history of the modern
Italian city-states, the humanists of the early Quattrocento paved the way
for the political science and the historiography of the Renaissance. In
their endeavour to understand the natural causes of the emergence of the
Italian system of states out of the dying body of the Empire, they came to
question the basic assumptions of medieval historiography — the faith in
the divine ordainment of a universal empire, heir of Rome, and the hap-
hazard methods by which the cities and noble families of medieval Europe
had traced their pedigrees to Troy or Rome, to Aeneas or Caesar. In
Italy these legends were in the early Quattrocento replaced by a realistic
reconstruction of the historical roles of the republic and the monarchy in
ancient Rome; the genesis of Florence, Venice, and Milan was conceived
in the framework of the pre-Roman civilisations, Rome’s colonisation of
Italy, the later decay of the Roman empire, and the cataclysms of the

1 For this estimate of the political situation, cf. N. Valeri, L' Italia nell'eta dei principal
dal 1343 al 1316 (1950), esp. pp. iSgff., 260 ff., and H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian
Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny
(1955). esp. pp. 7 If., 3i5ff., 379 ff. L. Simeoni, Le signorie (1950), attempts to make a
stronger case for the Visconti, and the tyrant-state in general.

Interpretations of the Quattrocento emphasising social-economic rather than social-
political factors are numerous, but, until now, have resulted in a confusing variety of views.
Besides the older theories of W. Sombart (Der Bourgeois ; in Engl, trans. Quintessence of
Capitalism) and A. v. Martin ( Sociology of the Renaissance), cf. F. Antal’s Florentine
Painting and Its Social Background (1947), together with the criticisms by T. E. Mommsen,
Jour. Hist. Ideas, xi (1950), pp. 369 ff. and M. Meiss, Art Bulletin, xxxi (1949), pp. I43ff.
For the divergence of viewpoints see also C. M. Cipolla, Economic Hist .Rev. (1949),
pp. 181 ff; A. Sapori, AttidelHI. convegno internazionale del Rinascimento, 1932, pp. I07ff.;
R. S. Lopez and H. Baron, American Hist. Rev. lxi (1956), pp. io87ff.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

Germanic migrations. Thus the histories of the regional states of Quattro-
cento Italy became the early models of the new historiography which, in
most cases not until a whole century later, superseded the medieval myths
of the past in all European nations.

Another mark left by the early Quattrocento on the humanistic mind
was produced by the values which determined the citizen’s outlook on
life. Petrarch and his contemporaries had read the classical writings on
moral conduct with the eyes of devout late-medieval laymen; ancient
wisdom and Christian persuasion appeared to them at one in giving pre-
ference to the contemplative life, and in teaching renunciation of material
goods and the need to free the mind from passion. It was because of this
interpretation that Petrarch’s treatises on moral questions immediately
became so popular all over Europe. In Italy after 1400, however, the
citizen’s pride in his own way of life, and the increasing knowledge of
antiquity, combined to bring on a revolt against such concessions to the
ascetic view. Nature, so it was argued, had equipped man for action and
usefulness to his family and fellow men; the culture of the humanist was
not to lead man into seclusion. Also, material possessions must not be
viewed merely with suspicion; for they provide the means for virtuous
deeds, and the history of man has been his progress in becoming lord of
the earth and its resources. Passion, ambition, and the striving after
glory are springs of action for a noble mind; they must be encouraged in
a humanistic education. There was no branch of humanist literature in
early fifteenth-century Italy where some of these ideas did not play a part,
and even in the later phases of the Renaissance, when movements dif-
ferent in spirit had risen in philosophy and literature, the early humanist
philosophy of life remained a spreading and transforming influence. The
views of human nature, history, and politics, found in the generation of
Machiavelli and Guicciardini, were still substantially moulded by this
influence. 1

By the time of Machiavelli, however, Italy had gradually reverted to
some of the social conditions and cultural trends from which Renaissance
civilisation had been turning during the first hundred years after Petrarch.
But, though from the second half of the Quattrocento onwards certain

1 For these interpretations of humanist Quattrocento culture and its relations to the
society and the politico-historical ideas of the Renaissance, see E. Garin, Der italienische
Humanismus (1947; Ital. version, L'umanesimo italiano: filosofia e vita civile nel Rinasci-
mento, 1952); H. Baron, The Crisis, and R. v. Albertini, Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein
im Obergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (1955). Cf. also A. Renaudet, ‘Le Problfcme
Historique de la Renaissance Italienne’, BibliotMqued'Hum. et Renaiss. ix (1947), pp. 21 ff.,
R. Spongano, ‘L’umanesimo e le sue origini,’ Giorn. stor. della lett. ital. cxxx (1953),
pp. 289 ff. ; and the chapter ‘The Early Humanist Tradition’ in W. K. Ferguson’s The
Renaissance in Historical Thought (1948). A different appraisal of early Italian humanism
— seen basically not as a new philosophy of life and history, but as continuation, on a
higher level, of the work of ‘medieval rhetoricians’ in grammar, poetry, and eloquence —
has been given by P. O. Kristeller, ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renais-
sance’, in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (1956).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

medieval traditions were resumed, they reappeared transformed by the
spirit of the Renaissance. One of these regressions was a marked change
in the character of the Italian courts. During the period of a stabilised
states-system after 1450, a new courtly society and nobility developed in
some of the monarchical states, particularly in Milan where the influence
of France was strong, as well as in the Ferrara of the Este family and in the
Mantua of the Gonzaga, both of whom had risen as vassals of the Empire
and had preserved a certain air of feudal lordship even through the early
Renaissance. It was especially in these courtly circles that the knightly
themes of the medieval epic and the ideals of chivalry were revived. Until
about 1450, the legends of the knights of Charlemagne and of King Arthur
had been used in Italy as popular entertainment by wandering singers;
during the second half of the century they were admitted to literature as
an alluring subject for romantic poetry — even in Florence, in the circle of
Lorenzo de’ Medici. Before the invading French armies appeared on the
peninsula, Matteo Boiardo at the court of Ferrara wrote his Orlando
Innamorato, the work which introduced a new phase in the history of
medieval epic traditions. Yet this resumption of long-discarded themes
meant a revival merely on the plane of artistic imagination ; neither the
medieval faith in the historicity of the glorious knightly feats nor the
medieval mingling of legend with historical truth were really renewed.
A measure of irony pervaded the resurgent admiration for chivalrous
bravery, loyalty and love, revealing a state of mind no longer medieval.
It is in a similar light that we must view the late Renaissance recasting
of the ideal of the perfect courtier, which was to find its most mature
expression in Baldesar Castiglione’s II Cortegiano, published in 1528,
but begun as early as about 1510. In contrast to the civic character of
early humanistic education, the new idea of the ‘courtier’ appears to
be a throw-back to the standards of a noble class. Yet, as conceived by
Castiglione, the cortegiano was the uomo universale of the Renaissance;
in substance, this notion of the courtier had not grown from the soil of
medieval knighthood, but was a transformation of the humanistic pro-
gramme for the culture of a rounded personality, built on the training of
the body and the mind as well as on encouragement of ambition and
every noble passion befitting human nature.

In late Quattrocento philosophy, the secularism of the early Renaissance
was thrust into the background through both the re-emergence of Neo-
platonism and a religious reinterpretation of Aristotle’s thought. The
Englishmen and Frenchmen who felt a kindred spirit in Ficino were
correct in thinking that Italy, after long concentration on the problems of
the temporal life, had returned in many respects to spiritual interests and
a devout attitude of mind. From the beginning of his career as a philo-
sopher, Ficino had rejected some of the basic tenets of the early humanists:
their insistence on the inseparable unity of soul and body, their high

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CIVILISATION

esteem for material goods, their preference for the active life and neglect
of the values of contemplation. The basic ideas of Ficino’s and Pico della
Mirandola’s metaphysical speculation, their abstract logical arguments,
the very structure of their writings did, indeed, testify to a reversion to
medieval and partly even to scholastic thinking. Yet, within this frame-
work, Ficino as well as Pico conceived the position of man in the universe,
his dignity and creative powers, in terms that were the language of the
Renaissance. Ficino’s Neoplatonism, in spite of its ascetic and scholastic
elements, was moulded by the humanistic spirit of Plato’s dialogues more
profoundly than any medieval philosophy had been. And if Ficino’s view
of life reflected a waning of the early Quattrocento civic spirit — a waning
ultimately caused by the rise in Ficino’s day of a disguised signoria in
Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici — still the relationship of Lorenzo, the
first Florentine citizen, to artists and men of letters bore little similarity to
the patronage at late-medieval princely courts. Social contact in Lorenzo’s
circle was the fulfilment of the ideals of human companionship that had
guided Italian humanists since Petrarch: a conscious attempt to revive
the ancient forms of cultured association as they were found in Cicero’s
and Plato’s dialogues and letters. Some of Ficino’s northern visitors
during Lorenzo’s last years could still attend the informal meetings of
friends in the ‘Platonic Academy’ whose members, emulating Plato and
his disciples, gathered in Lorenzo’s villa at Careggi for philosophical
discussion and a social fife in which art and music played a foremost part.
It was in these gatherings, and through the work of Ficino, that the Platonic
philosophy of love obtained the central position in Renaissance thought
that it continued to occupy in European literature, philosophy, and art
during the sixteenth century.

The meeting in the 1490’s of northern scholarship with the Italian
humanistic Renaissance, then, was fraught with potentialities for the
future of European culture. Although the ‘new learning’, which was
rising at Oxford, London, Paris, in the Low Countries, in the Rhinelands,
and in Spain, was meant to give direction to religious studies, its actual
effect was like the opening of a window looking out on the wide new
world that in the course of two centuries had emerged in Italy. Thenceforth
the assimilation and adaptation of the Italian achievements in education
and politico-historical thought, in literature and art, in social intercourse
and in the philosophy of man, became a basic task of all cultural life.
The performance of this task was mainly the work of the period from
1490 to 1520 when the Renaissance issued forth as a movement European
in scope; but the process was to go on until the seventeenth century,
during the long years in which the Reformation, the overseas discoveries,
and the beginnings of modem natural science gradually reversed the
cultural balance between Italy and the rest of Europe.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER IV

THE PAPACY AND
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

after the long period of strife brought about by the Great Schism,
ZA the Church had at last become reunited. Rallying round Nicholas V
J A(i449), it seemed as though, in a less troubled atmosphere, it would
now pursue its unchanging ideal. There resounded once more the two
words which symbolised its twin aspirations: at home, reform; abroad,
crusade. Both were of pressing necessity. Perspicacious minds in every
country were calling for a far-reaching reform of the Church and hoping
— somewhat vaguely, it is true — for something of a return to the purity of
earlier times. As far as the crusade against the Turks was concerned,
events which moved daily more rapidly were enough to prove, even to the
most indifferent, that it had become inescapably necessary. From then
on, and for a long time to come, reform at home and crusade abroad were
to occupy a prominent place in papal speeches — in speeches and bulls
rather than in deeds.

Indeed, by the middle of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance was
already to some extent bursting upon Italy, and the brilliance with which
it was spreading was to dazzle the Papacy itself no less than the nations.
Nicholas V, a first-rate scholar (he it was who founded the Vatican
Library), was to be the first ‘Renaissance Pope’, and his decision to pull
down the old basilica of Constantine and put up in its place a building in
keeping with the spirit of the new age was a sign of his propensities and
tastes. His decision, it should be added, has been criticised as an act of
vandalism. The brilliance of the Renaissance was to be so intense as to
blind the pope to every other ideal and lead the Holy See into a course
where temporal glory and artistic splendour pushed spiritual matters into
the background. Even an event as spectacular as the capture of Con-
stantinople by the Turks (1453) could not rouse the already lukewarm
fervour of the Christian world, nor did it effectively tear the Papacy
away from preoccupations primarily concerned with earthly glories — or
even, more sordidly, from mere family ambitions.

Calixtus III, a fiery Spaniard, appeared for a time as the prophet and
champion of the crusade: the papal fleet — the first amazing venture of
the Papacy in this sphere — was a bold but short-lived achievement. On
the other hand, with this pope — the first of the Borgias — nepotism, the
curse of his and the succeeding century, began to poison the atmosphere
of Rome. Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius) was the perfect example of a humanist
pontiff. An engaging personality, this pope left an extensive literary pro-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

duction: in addition to a novel, Euryalus and Lucretia, and a comedy,
Chrysis, both written moreover before he took orders, mention may be
made of the voluminous correspondence in which his discerning mind is
often in evidence, and his Commentaries, which are still of great historical
interest, even if they are not always completely objective. Circumspect
and adaptable in diplomacy, this pontiff seemed to be marked out for
great undertakings, and especially to organise at last the crusade which
had been so dear to his predecessor. But the results of his activities were
disappointing in the extreme. He was doubtless sincere in appealing for
a crusade, but could he really believe that such an enterprise would
succeed? His famous bull Exsecrabilis, a clear affirmation of pontifical
absolutism, was to re-echo for many a year. Europe was already irre-
trievably split up and torn apart; the old common ideal had been aban-
doned little by little: these were not encouraging factors, and the pontiff
soon realised it. Because of his assertion, tinged though it was with
despair, of the traditional Christian ideal of universality, he is to our minds,
as has been said, the last great pope of the Middle Ages.

After him, the decline of the Papacy became more marked. Paul II, a
luxury-loving Venetian, was certainly not the man to restore an unstable
situation. And what can we say of the three ‘evil geniuses of the Church’,
Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII and Alexander VI? The shameless nepotism of
Sixtus IV, and his violent and extortionate policy are damning to his
memory. He can, of course, be regarded as a great figure of the Renaissance
scene, a typical Maecenas, but was not that characteristic in his day
of many an Italian princeling, with whom he has all too close a re-
semblance by virtue of his territorial ambitions and aggressive absolutism?
Already the nations, and the Germanic world in particular, were about
to give vent to their bitterness and rancour and to cast their vehement
gravamina in his face. Already cracks were showing in the Christian
edifice, symptomatic of the split to come. Nor were the pitiless methods
and plundering cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition likely to enhance the
prestige of the Papacy, whatever may be thought in other respects of such
a variously judged figure as Torquemada. More ominous still, if that is
possible, were the eight years of the pontificate of Innocent VIII : it was then
that nepotism and financial exaction reached their evil height. ‘The Lord
desireth not the death of a sinner’, said his vice-chamberlain, ‘but rather
that he may live and pay. ’ To this pontificate the bull Summis desiderantes
belongs: sinister in its renown, it was to give a powerful stimulus to trials
for witchcraft (1484). Shortly afterwards, the fearful Malleus maleficarum
(1487) was to become a manual for inquisitors. This pontificate touched a
baseness unheard-of until then : internal reform, which had been scarcely
tackled, marked time ; as for crusade, no one believed in it any longer. If
the masses persisted in their trusting submission to the Holy See, the elite
and the rulers themselves were either lacking in deference or openly

8 77 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

rebellious, and the example of George Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia,
was not easily forgotten. For a long time to come, the threat of an appeal
to a general council was to be a constant bugbear to the popes.

While the Papacy, forgetful of the great part it ought to have been
playing, was becoming involved in paltry family intrigues and weakening
its authority by agreeing to unfortunate compromises, the first official
Turkish embassy arrived at Rome at the end of November 1490. The
astonishing story of Jem, son of Mehemmed II and brother of Bayezid
(p. 398), symbolised papal policy towards the Turks, a venal policy lacking
in perception. Meanwhile, tremendous events were taking place, among
them the discovery of the New World. The year 1492 saw Christopher
Columbus landing in America and at the same time Rodrigo de Borgia,
thanks to agreements notoriously tainted with simony, ascending the throne
of St Peter. By a curious mockery, the widening of the world’s horizons
coincided with the accession of the man least worthy of the supreme
pontificate.

It would be difficult to be better endowed by nature than was Don
Rodrigo de Borgia, elected pope in 1492 as Alexander VI, but it would be
almost impossible to make worse use of such remarkable gifts. Conse-
quently, this disconcerting pope has been most severely judged. There can
be no question here of pleading for such a man, still less of sketching out
any kind of rehabilitation as certain historians have somewhat unsuccess-
fully tried to do. It is true that he typified, to the highest degree, Renais-
sance man: he had a versatile intelligence, extraordinary energy, boundless
ambition, but he was also completely unscrupulous. There is no need to
dwell upon the excesses and crimes, exaggerated even further by legend,
of a family always treated by the pope with unpardonable weakness.
Many of his contemporaries, accustomed though they were to the scented
scandals and sumptuous horrors of the Italian courts of the time, cried
shame.

The tragedy of the Savonarola affair was due above all to the violent
contrast between this reforming friar and the unworthy pontiff. Prompted
by ardent zeal and sincere piety, the friar from Ferrara, Girolamo Savona-
rola, like so many others, was consumed with a desire to reform the
Church, restore it to its early purity and wrest it from the hands of
questionable pastors. Like so many preachers of that time, Savonarola
liked to make the crowds tremble with his impassioned and vaguely pro-
phetic sermons. The pope, for long indifferent, was roused only when he
himself was personally attacked with extraordinary violence. Furthermore,
the astonishing dictatorship which Savonarola for several years exercised
over a Florence he held in subjection, had brought hatred upon his
authority, which had at first been easily accepted. The excesses in which
Savonarola’s partisans unhesitatingly indulged have often been described ;

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

similarly, the festivals and ceremonies established by the dictator enjoyed
long-lasting fame and still seem a strange phenomenon. It is difficult to
imagine that the Florentines enjoyed those dances of old men or bur-
gesses garlanded with flowers, those masquerades which, far from en-
nobling it, made a laughing-stock of religious feeling. To be sure, together
with these childish things, more serious and comparatively new ideas
might be discerned, even if only the relatively democratic conception of his
‘popular government’, but in that too the extravagances of a few fanatics
ruined everything. In an atmosphere of extreme nervous tension — as
also amid a strange tangle of obscure political intrigues — Savonarola did
not perceive that Florence would soon slip from his grasp and that events
were turning in the pope’s favour. The historian is bound to record, with
some regret, that the reformer’s excellent intentions, warped by an obvious
lack of balance, were leading to a frankly intolerable regime: vexatious
dealings worthy of the Inquisition coupled with grotesque ceremonies
were scarcely capable of restoring morals! Events followed each other
in quick succession once Savonarola had been excommunicated — a puni-
tive weapon whose edge was not yet blunted in the eyes of public opinion.
The absurd tragi-comedy of trial by fire, which revived the atmosphere of
real scenes of ordeal from the later Middle Ages, was fatal to the reformer
and hardly allows him to be considered as a forerunner of modem ideas.
Soon afterwards, he was executed (May 1498) and, in the unwonted
seething of passions and din of war, he was quickly forgotten. Much
later, Savonarola was to be claimed as one of the precursors of the Protes-
tant Reformation, an opinion widely held, but ill founded.

For all its bewildering character, this episode was as nothing compared
with other events that were taking place, and as yet it shook the prestige
of the Papacy less than might have been expected. Clear proof of this
is to be found in the pope’s celebrated arbitration between Spain and
Portugal in the matter of the immense territories discovered by Columbus
and his successors. 1 Admittedly, it was believed that it was a question of
a few islands rather than a whole continent, and that is perhaps why they
were treated in a series of bulls as being within the jurisdiction of papal
suzerainty over ‘islands’, a theory which had long been put forward.
Hence the six ‘Alexandrine Bulls’, spread over the years 1493-1501, the
most important of which was that of 28 June 1493 ( Inter cetera ), called
the ‘bull of demarcation’. This partition of newly-discovered lands was
perhaps purely medieval in conception : it was certainly already an ana-
chronism whose stupidity the Maritime Powers of the future, England,
France and the Low Countries, were later to show.

In their turn, the pope’s constant efforts to establish the redoubtable
members of his family firmly on Italian soil were not destined to be any

1 L. Weckmann, Las bulas alejandrinas de 1493 y la teoria politico del Papado medieval,
estudio de la supremacia papal sobre islas (Mexico, Institute de Historia, 1949).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

more successful. In the European imbroglio resulting from the develop-
ment of the wars in Italy, in which the kings of France experienced illus-
trious triumphs no less than crushing defeats, the machinations of a pope
like Alexander VI could only bring feeble repercussions in their wake.
Discredited because he had toadied too much to the French king
Louis XII (in the matter of the latter’s divorce, an insolent farce that had
shocked public opinion), dishonoured by his private life and the infamies
and cruelties of his family, would the pope yet lead Christendom on a
Turkish crusade? The Turks, assuredly, still constituted a threat, but in a
Europe tom asunder Alexander VI was the last man to awaken the
enthusiasm needed in such undertakings. He was much more liable to
enter into tortuous intrigues with the infidel, intrigues such that it has been
said that his policy was Turcophil. 1 So it was not surprising that the show
of force made by the Christian fleets in the Aegean Sea in 150 1-2 did not
produce brilliant results. The crusading idea was dead indeed.

In almost every state, on the other hand, the tendency towards the
establishment of a national Church was becoming more and more marked,
and this disruptive movement was all the more serious because at that
time the signs of incipient nationalism were making their appearance.
Maximilian in Germany and Louis XII in France were dreaming, one of
a German national Church, the other of a Gallican Church, each strictly
subject to its respective sovereign. In France, the kings boldly made play
with the Pragmatic Sanction (below, p. 302) in the face of an irresolute
Papacy. The same tendencies, with slight differences, were to be seen in
Spain, in England and even in Italy. The Papacy reacted only half-
heartedly, satisfied with day-to-day settlements and compromises.

As for the question of internal reform of the Church, which was still
being debated, no real progress could be discovered: while enlightened
opinion persisted in demanding it, the Papacy never succeeded in drawing
up a coherent programme of reforms. It was thus only a question of a
few isolated attempts inconsistent in method. For this reason, the Fleming
Jean Standonck (1443-1504) deserves to be remembered. His ideal of
austerity and asceticism, belonging therefore to the Middle Ages, was not
always very much appreciated, and his already out-of-date ideas earned
the gibes of Erasmus. On the other hand, the spiritual exercises recom-
mended by Jean Mombaer (1460-1501) hardly sufficed to bring about a
revival of piety. On the whole, in spite of the zeal of these reformers and
their disciples, its effects were most insignificant, except perhaps in the
Iberian peninsula where, notably as a result of the efforts of Cardinal
Jim&nez de Cisneros, the seeds of the great mystical movement of the
sixteenth century were beginning to grow.

If the pontificate of Pius III, which lasted a mere three weeks, deserves

1 H. Pfeffermann, Die Zusammenarbeit der Renaissancepdpste mil den Tiirken (Winter-
thur, 1946).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

to be mentioned only in passing, we must, on the other hand, dwell at
length upon that of a pope who was an exceptionally powerful figure,
Julius II. The life of this nephew of Sixtus IV had been eventful, and in
the course of a brilliant career he had shown indomitable energy and
vigorous administrative ability. A passionate, warlike spirit, better fitted
for violent activity than for meditation, thus it is that this pope appears
in Raphael’s famous picture which has been so often reproduced and
interpreted: tight lips, flashing, deepset eyes, ‘terrible’ as his contem-
poraries averred.

His undeniably successful domestic policy led to a secure restoration of
papal power in the states of the Church which, until then, had been
devastated by constant anarchy. Within a short time, Julius II had removed
the redoubtable Caesar Borgia, who had been so powerful a few years
earlier, made the most turbulent of the feudal nobles see reason, and put
down brigandage. Making bold to pursue a policy of his own, this pope,
endowed with the gifts of a warrior, did not hesitate to lead in person
more than one expedition, to the stupefaction of a Europe which was
nevertheless accustomed to spectacles that would appear scandalous today.
His rapid conquest of Perugia, then of Bologna, gave the pope the op-
portunity of celebrating his successes with a ceremonial which was rather
too vivid a reminder of the triumphal processions of Roman emperors
(1507). From then on, Julius II was to be at the centre of every diplomatic
manoeuvre. It was he who organised the struggle against Venice, which
was quickly crushed thanks to the support he received from France (1509);
then it was he who, unscrupulously changing his policy, restored that
same Venice whose humiliation had been too great, and took steps to
create the Holy League against the French, whose ambitions he dreaded
and whom he wished to drive out of Italy. The most spectacular episode
of these wars was the siege and capture of the fortress of Mirandola in
midwinter: the pope, helmeted, directed the operations in person, in
exceptionally cold weather. Naturally, his prowess earned the admiration
of some, Machiavelli for example, but it scandalised enlightened people,
and rightly so. His was undoubtedly a bold policy, fruitful in its imme-
diate consequences, but fraught with tremendous risks for the future.
Finding it necessary to play off the principal sovereigns one against the
other in succession, Julius II turned Italy into a battlefield for a long time
and drew down upon his country those ‘ barbarians ’, as he termed them,
whom he earnestly desired to destroy. All that was gained from these
things, for civilisation if not for the Church, was that the new principles
of the Italian Renaissance spread through a Europe that was still very
medieval.

This unleashing of acts of violence by a pope was ill-received by those
who were still able to preserve sound judgment. Suffice it here to recall
the celebrated passages directed by Erasmus against the pope who filled

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

him with horror. In the Praise of Folly (151 1) the humanist wrote these
lines in which Julius II, though not expressly named, could not fail to
be recognised:

Although in the Gospel the Apostle Peter says to his divine Master: We have left all,
and followed Thee, yet the popes call His patrimony lands, cities, tribute, princi-
palities; for which, being enflamed with the love of Christ, they contend with fire
and sword, and not without loss of much Christian blood, and boast that they have
then most apostolically defended the Church, the spouse of Christ, when the enemy,

as they call them, are valiantly routed Here you’ll see decrepit old fellows acting

the parts of young men, neither troubled at their enormous cost nor wearied with
the labour involved .... becoming, in short, the scourges of the human race.

The allusion was transparent, and no one mistook it. The same criticisms
were to be found in the Querela Pads of 1517:

What have the helmet and mitre in common? What connection is there between the
crozier and the sword? between the Holy Gospel and the buckler? How, O bishop
standing in the room of the Apostles, dare you teach the peoples the things that
pertain to war?

Lastly, the pamphlet entitled Julius exclusus a coelis, attributed to Erasmus
without altogether conclusive evidence, gives expression in bitter terms to
the indignation felt by the enlightened section of the Christian world at
conduct which was far indeed from being evangelical.

The pontificate of Julius II also witnessed one of the most conspicuous
episodes in the struggle between conciliar trends and papal absolutism, a
struggle whose progress, since the Great Schism, had been marked by
resounding events. Already in the middle of the fifteenth century, Pius II
had most clearly and solemnly expressed papal doctrine in his bull
Exsecrabilis, but the conciliar movement favoured the sovereigns’ interests
too much to disappear quickly. The end of the fifteenth century indeed
saw the popes still asserting their absolutism, but it also witnessed the
revival of conciliar doctrine by certain princes. Louis XI, the king of
France, for example, had used and abused this threat in his dealings with
Sixtus IV, and he was not alone in doing so. Later, Alexander VI had for
long feared that he might be deposed by a council. Under Julius II the
struggle was resumed with extraordinary intensity. In 1509 the pope had
solemnly reaffirmed the terms of the bull of Pius II ; for his part, the king
of France, Louis XII, whom the policy of Julius II had just isolated on
the level of international politics, attempted to bring about a signal victory
for the conciliar thesis by prevailing upon a few cardinals who were
zealous in his service to call a general council at Pisa (16 May 15 1 1). To
this Julius II retorted by calling a council himself — also a general one —
for 19 April 1512 at the Lateran. It is impossible to imagine the two
opposing theories confronting each other more vigorously: in the sight
of contemporary opinion, the test was to be decisive.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The beginnings of Louis XII’s attempt, which was in any case wavering,
augured badly. Only a very small number of cardinals consented to go to
Pisa, and no one could believe that this small group of dissentients re-
presented the Universal Church. It was quickly realised that the members
of this council were merely the unenthusiastic instruments of French
policy. So this council — or rather this ‘conciliabulum’, as its adversaries
called it — could only drag on a languishing existence, knowing that it was
in a false position and doomed to failure from the start. A few prelates
devoted to the service of the king of France tried in vain to stage an
impressive manifestation ; they went as far as arraigning the pope and pro-
mulgating a decree of suspension against him (21 April 1512). But this
produced practically no effect. The pope then contemplated making a
counterstroke which proves that the papal claims of the time of Gregory
VII and Innocent III were not yet forgotten: the throne of the king of
France would be declared vacant and the crown transferred to Henry VIII
of England! However, the pope no doubt realised that such a decision
was out of date and that it would be impossible to carry it out, for the
brief which he prepared on it was never more than a draft, and most of his
contemporaries knew nothing of it, while for us it is only a curiosity of
history, though rich in implications.

The period of the ‘council’ of Pisa witnessed on both sides the birth of
a polemical literature which is one of the first modern examples of the use
of propaganda in politics. The pope and the king of France exerted them-
selves in its use whole-heartedly and with equal violence. But, in the long
run, these innumerable pamphlets and the theatrical performances in
which the pope was shown with ludicrous or hateful characteristics suc-
ceeded only in confusing and dismaying public opinion which, almost
exclusively, disliked the idea of setting up the council against the pope.
It was all too easy for the supporters of the king of France and the Council
of Pisa to stigmatise the machinations of Julius II, his warlike frenzy, his
tortuous political manoeuvring and his neglect of the traditional role of the
church as peacemaker. But, in spite of the veritable profusion of methods
used, there was scarcely any response from the masses. It must not, indeed,
be forgotten that the people on the whole still respected the papacy, even
though it might be represented by an Alexander VI or a Julius II. From
many points of view, the general atmosphere was still very much that of
the Middle Ages, and it was not to change for at least two generations.
French opinion was weary of quarrels to which it could see no solution,
weary also of the Italian expeditions which it vaguely felt to be futile in
the political sphere. When news of the military disasters of 1512 was
spread abroad, everyone realised that the days of the Council of Pisa were
numbered. On the other hand, the Fifth Lateran Council, solemnly
opened by Julius II on 3 May 1512, appeared more and more clearly to
be winning over the majority of prelates. The spiritual sanctions it decided

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

on against the king of France and his supporters made a great impression,
and the king himself, wavering even before then, was very much shaken.
From then on, it became clear that the Council of Pisa would have an
inglorious end : soon afterwards, its members dispersed.

And so it was a triumph for the pope. Indeed, in January 1513 a real
‘Roman triumph’ was given to Julius, the ‘liberator of Italy’. This was
proof enough that the pope had acted much more as an Italian prince
than as head of the Universal Church. One can imagine the pope’s
immeasurable satisfaction at seeing himself depicted in the guise of an
emperor wielding an earthly sceptre. It was not to be his to enjoy
for long. A few weeks later, this extraordinary pope lay dying: he had
been, for but a short space, it is true, the ‘arbiter of the whole world’.

Severe judgment must be passed on this pope who was admired by
Machiavelli. Many of his contemporaries were greatly distressed by the
methods he so brazenly made use of and which were unworthy of the
leader of Christendom. The Florentine historian, Guicciardini, in a very
objective judgment, wrote:

He would have been a pope worthy of the highest renown if he had been a secular
prince or if the care and diligence he showed in glorifying the church in the temporal
sphere and through the art of war had been used to glorify it in the spiritual sphere
through the arts of peace; yet he was worthier than any of his predecessors to be
honoured and held in illustrious remembrance.

This exceptional man, bom for pomp and war, a protector of the arts
and a military commander, had the soul of a founder of empires, but was
not cast in the mould of the leader of a church whose aim was to be
universal.

The sixteenth century was formerly often called the ‘Age of Leo X’;
one may at least say that the personality of the successor of Julius II is
not to be disregarded. Giovanni de’ Medici, son of the great Florentine
Lorenzo the Magnificent, was elected, while still very young, on 1 1 March
1513, and his election was favourably received. The Christian world had
grown weary of the warlike exuberance of the late pope: the new ponti-
ficate seemed likely to be more peaceable.

The new pope, Leo X, bore no resemblance to his predecessor, for
whom, by the way, he had no liking. Of a most refined and cultured mind,
a protector of humanists, scholars and artists, there was no longer any-
thing medieval about him : on the contrary, he was the very personification
of the Renaissance. His pontificate seemed to herald the advent of an era
of tolerance and generosity, just as his round, plump face, somewhat
slothful of aspect, contrasted markedly with the savage countenance of
Julius II. Settlements by diplomacy rather than declarations of war could
be expected of a man like this. This became evident in matters affecting
relations with France.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The new policy of flexibility was revealed almost immediately when the
disturbing affair of the Council of Pisa was wound up : instead of treating
them harshly as some demanded, Leo X extended a free pardon to those
lost sheep who gave evidence of their repentance by going through a real
ceremony of recantation. Having dressed this internal wound, he had
to find a way of concluding the Italian wars which had received fresh
impetus from the accession of Francis I, the new king of France. In this
matter also, a flexible policy had become indispensable.

The time was well chosen. Each of the two adversaries desired an inter-
view which might put an end to a situation in which everyone was awk-
wardly placed. At Bologna (11-15 December 1515) king and pope laid
the foundations of an agreement which they had long felt to be necessary.
For almost a century the Church in France had been without authority,
tom between two masters both equally inclined to absolutism. The Prag-
matic Sanction had not brought to the French Church the liberties it was
intended to give. On the contrary, indeed, that Church had passed through
grievous times, when bishoprics and monasteries, regarded merely as
spoils, had been wrangled over in the most pernicious way. Hardly
anywhere were elections held in due form, for the king succeeded in
foisting his own candidates upon the electors by every conceivable means,
not excluding the most ruthless: there are accounts of episcopal elections
which tell of dealings disgraceful in the extreme. Even if there was no
struggle vi et armis, there was a lawsuit before the Parlement or Grand
Conseil: the picture one feels bound to paint is deplorable, and the body
of the faithful groaned, not knowing which pastor to obey. This situation
could not go on. By common consent, a sincere agreement between
king and pope was a matter of the greatest urgency. It was achieved,
but not without difficulty, by the Concordat of Bologna.

This concordat took credit to itself for putting an end to all these
evils and abuses, and the settlements it proposed had the appearance of
reasonableness. The following is a brief summary of them. With regard
to benefices, nomination was reserved to the king, canonical institution
to the pope, a logical division of prerogatives, but one which involved
discontinuance of elections. This seemed to be an innovation of the utmost
seriousness, but was only apparently so : in point of fact, as we have seen,
elections had long been no more than a myth. Further, the king’s choice
was not to be purely arbitrary: he had thus to abide by rules respecting
the candidates’ age and suitability. Otherwise, the pope was empowered
to reject any candidate he deemed unworthy. In the matter of jurisdiction,
the pope made considerable concessions — inevitably, because the Paris
Parlement had always rebelled against the claims of the court of Rome.
As for the very delicate question of taxation, which lay at the heart of the
problem, it was not tackled altogether without equivocation, and it was
soon thought that the king had yielded a good deal of ground. The

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

possibility of a tax on benefices to the advantage of the Roman treasury
was still a menacing contingency. Naturally — and this was an enormous
success for the pope — the Pragmatic Sanction was abolished, and in terms
such that those close to the king dared not make them public. Finally,
the concordat contained a few articles concerning reform of the Church;
but they were rather faint-hearted and were never seriously regarded as
efficacious. At bottom, the concordat left many problems still unsolved.

T his being so, it was not accepted in France without some lively dis-
plays of opposition, encouraged by the king’s hesitancy. The Parlement
and university showed determined hostility to the idea of accepting the
papal bulls, and engaged throughout the country in a campaign of agitation
which forced the king and his chancellor, Duprat, to take stern measures.
The Parlement agreed to register the concordat only on 22 March 1518,
and two days later it protested vigorously yet again against the decision
which had been forced upon it. For several months longer, in university
circles and those of the Parlement, the restlessness continued. But in spite
of this opposition, the concordat was enforced.

The fiscal exactions of the Papacy, treated with too much circumspection
in the concordat, were still one of the black spots of the situation. For two
centuries, these exactions had given rise to much agitation: every govern-
ment had censured their excesses, which grew daily more oppressive. At
the end of the fifteenth century especially, it was all too clear that the
financial needs of the Papacy — sometimes for the meanest ends — governed
the entire policy of the Roman See.

While as yet the most hot-headed protesters did not think of eventually
breaking with Rome, a few voices were nevertheless heard here and there,
pillorying the hated excesses of these exactions and drawing the pope’s
attention to the dangers of such a policy. The feeling of being robbed
through taxation largely explains the anti-Roman attitude perceptible in
certain episodes, in Germany more seriously than elsewhere, though they
occurred everywhere to some extent. The notoriously inadequate attempts
to reform the Church, and the deplorable pontificates of the end of the
fifteenth century, provided the foundation for that genuine 1 anticlericalism ’
which we observe at that time, not only among certain sections of the
aristocracy or the common people, but above all among the wealthy tax-
paying burgesses of the larger cities. Hence the wide circulation of the
gravamina, for example, which persisted for several generations. More-
over, these tendencies were not at variance with a faith that was still deep-
rooted and, in some cases, quite medieval. Indeed, it was in the most
profoundly religious nations of the time that this state of mind, combined
with pained indignation and rebellious nationalist feeling, was most
sharply apparent. This was particularly the case in Germany, where this
movement provides a partial explanation for Luther’s success, and in
England, where it was later to lead to the creation of a national church

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

disunited from Rome. A spark would be enough to set everything on fire :
the affair of the ‘indulgences’ was to be that spark.

Frequently misunderstood as it has been, a reminder of what an indul-
gence was is not out of place here. It was a remission, plenary or partial
as the case might be, of punishment for sin which still had to be suffered,
on earth or in purgatory, even after the sacrament of penance had given
the sinner absolution for his lapse. To be in a state of grace was an
indispensable preliminary condition. In addition, prayer, fasting and
self-denial were ordained, as well as the performance of such good works
as giving donations and alms, visiting churches, paying for pilgrimages,
carrying out works of charity or even of general utility, such as building
churches, bridges, roads or dykes. Understood in this sense, indulgences
had been variously applied, often to the benefit of the community. As
for applying indulgences to the dead, this had been long in dispute but
was at that time authorised and enjoyed considerable favour. Unfor-
tunately, the practice was too much open to abuse. By a strange lack of
vigilance, charlatanism was rife : a whole host of more or less official alms-
collectors and scores of ‘indulgence preachers’ went about promising
all too easily absolution for any crime in exchange for money. For
this reason, these things were bitterly and justifiably criticised, often
by people who were sincere in their devotion to these practices, and in
particular in regard to indulgences for the dead. Ignorance and bad
faith conspired together to bring into disrepute an institution which,
moreover, seemed too obviously to be a shameful expedient accepted by
the Church as a means of increasing its wealth. Whereas it ought to have
helped in promoting spiritual advancement, it was in fact one of the many
methods used in the exaction of money for the Church. At that time,
indeed, the end of the Middle Ages, it must be admitted that the popes
had a most unfortunate tendency to increase the number of indulgences
granted for purely fiscal purposes. The moral effect of this was deplorable,
and was condemned by men of enlightened views. Erasmus was doing
no more than expressing the feelings of a large section of the public when
he wrote, in a well-known passage of the Praise of Folly:

What should I say of them that hug themselves with their counterfeit pardons;
that have measured Purgatory by an hour-glass, and can without the least mistake
demonstrate its ages, years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds, as it were in
a mathematical table? And now suppose some Merchant, Soldier, or Judge, parts
with some small piece of ill-gotten money. He at once conceives all that sink of his
whole life quite cleansed; so many perjuries, so many lusts, so many debaucheries,
so many contentions, so many murders, so many deceits, so many breaches of trust,
so many treacheries bought off, as it were, by compact; and so bought off that they
may begin upon a new score

Now it happened that, from the day of his accession, Leo X needed
considerable sums of money in order, in particular, to carry on with the

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

erection of the basilica of St Peter in Rome. To collect funds, the pope
had the unhappy inspiration of granting an indulgence (October 1513)
for the continuation of work on this historic building, and made the
mistake of entrusting the preaching of this indulgence to men who did
not hesitate to bring any kind of pressure to bear and who were apt to
make use of methods befitting fairground mountebanks. One of these
preachers, Tetzel, behaved in such a way in Germany as to arouse the
indignation of Luther, and it was he who provided Luther with the oppor-
tunity, at Wittenberg, of presenting his famous ninety-five theses on the
value of indulgences (31 October 1517). The consequences were therefore
incalculable. This is not the place to describe them, but rather must we
give a picture of the state of the Papacy and Christendom, as well as of
public opinion, in the years 1515-20.

As yet, the influence of the Renaissance had not been felt with general
force. Italy was well in advance of the rest of Europe, and everywhere the
medieval world resisted to some extent the encroachments of the new
ideal. If, in Italy, the movement may be regarded as something of a
return to a glorious past, it was not the same in other countries whose
national traditions were very different. Fundamentally, the Christianity
of Renaissance Italy was unlike that of other Christian nations, particu-
larly with regard to the outward forms and appearance of devotion. The
Italian mind, accustomed as it was to a sometimes disconcerting blend of
‘inner paganism and emotional mysticism’, quite readily accepted the new
conventions that were arising. Among the masses the most unfortunate
superstitions were current, but on the other hand these same masses were
not shocked by the rather theatrical attitudes struck by certain represen-
tatives of the upper classes whose incredulity was somewhat affected. And
one may doubt whether deliberately out-of-date conspirators, like those
who were members of the Roman Academy in the time of Paul II, were
really taken seriously. The influence of men such as Lorenzo Valla or
Pomponazzi or even Machiavelli on the common people was naturally
insignificant; likewise, souls as tormented as those of Pico della Mirandola
and Botticelli were few and far between. Generally speaking, the peoples
of Italy could scarcely be aware of such uneasiness of conscience, still less
of the schisms of world-wide concern or the national heresies that were
soon to be observed on their borders.

Almost everywhere else, the situation was more dangerous to the Papacy.
To begin with, it should not be forgotten that the end of the fifteenth
century and the start of the sixteenth witnessed a great upsurge of
nationalism, especially in Germany and France. In the Germanic empire,
a genuine national awakening can be sensed in the reign of Maximilian.
Doubtless this sovereign was not cut out to be a great statesman ; besides,
he was sadly lacking in the material resources needed for any large-scale

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

enterprise. But his chivalrous personality was such that a Germanic
patriotism of a sort became crystallised around him. Maximilian would
have had no objection to the establishment of a Germanic national
church with only the loosest of ties with Rome — even if he never seriously
thought (as some have averred) of becoming in reality its pope! But on
whom could he rely for support? He could not count on the higher clergy
who appear on the whole to have been very second-rate, more interested
in increasing their temporal revenues or hunting than in raising the
religious or moral standards of the nation. As for the people, they were,
as in other countries, deeply religious, fervent to the point of causing
new churches to be built, and so liberal as to maintain innumerable
charitable foundations. And yet they evinced feelings hostile to Rome, of
which the Papacy was to become aware only when it was too late. The
national genius of Germany was charting for the influential classes in the
nation a route very different from that followed by the elite of Italy. Of
course, German opinion took no small interest in the Renaissance move-
ment in Italy, but it was with keen anxiety that it watched certain practices
of the court of Rome to which the Italians were accustomed, if not in-
different. This same attitude may be seen in the mistrust of accepting
Roman law shown by the German people: for Roman law was also con-
sidered to run counter to their national aspirations and traditions. These
feelings were aggravated by the blundering and vexatious fiscal measures
of the Papacy. Charles V went so far as to say that Rome levied more
money in Germany than did the emperor himself. In such an atmosphere,
Luther’s revolt could not fail to find ample support. The few weeks — at
the end of 1510 and beginning of 1511 — which the German monk spent
in Rome served only to intensify his dislike of the kind of life led by the
pope and his intimates which was depicted for him in the blackest hues.
Having no understanding of the peculiar characteristics of devotional
practices in Italy, which shocked him profoundly, he returned to Germany
embittered and disillusioned. He doubtless experienced great spiritual
uneasiness, but failed also to understand a civilisation different from his
own. In the same way — also in 1510 — the English ambassador, Richard
Pace, expressed his intense disgust with the corruption of the court of
Rome.

In England, the situation in general presented obvious similarities to
that which has just been described. Among the masses there was deep
and sincere piety, displayed in ways as numerous as they are undeniable,
also a feeling of mistrust towards the fiscal and judicial organisation of
the Church. Despite all that has been said on the subject, the people as a
whole had in no wise abandoned traditional practices. On the contrary
there was much fervour, which gave rise to a real flowering of church
building and religious foundations. It has rightly been pointed out that
more than half the books printed in England between 1468 and 1530 were

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

religious works, two-thirds of these being devotional treatises. This was
so, one should add, all over Europe, where the proportion of religious
works to the total number of books printed was the same. In England,
as everywhere else, the liking for religious literature was very pronounced,
and the taste of the public for the innumerable small volumes of popular
piety was insatiable. It is not surprising to discover this in a country
which was still to all intents and purposes more medieval than the Conti-
nent, in its art as well as in its literature. Some significance may be attached
to the fact that John Mirk’s old Liber festivalis, a collection of sermons
and religious legends composed before 1415, ran through no less than
nineteen editions between 1483 and 1532. As for manuals devoted to
preaching, and even to asceticism and mysticism, the first thirty years or
so of the sixteenth century swarmed with them. In contrast to these dis-
plays of enthusiasm, the national consciousness of England at the same
time gave evidence of unmistakable anti-clerical feeling, particularly — as
in Germany — among the wealthy and cultured middle classes. Although
they were no longer a dangerous body, the Lollards had certainly not
disappeared.

Such were the faithful. What, compared with them, was the state of
mind of the clergy? It is indeed dangerous and futile, in dealing with such
problems as this, to try to offer a solution which might be valid for all
countries and at every moment in any given period. In the light of recent
research, however, a few general impressions can be specified.

Let us look first at the higher clergy. They could easily be crushingly
condemned if one mentioned the numerous cases of prelates who were
warriors rather than pastors. Particularly in Germany, there was the
kind of bishop, stigmatised by Thomas Miirner and Erasmus, who was
also a great feudal lord. In France, too, it is undeniable that a few dis-
turbing personalities stand out. Others were less warlike, and prepared
to cut a figure as humanists or patrons of the arts: they, too, lost the
‘ spiritual understanding of their mission In order to be quite objective,
it is well to remember that one should not draw false generalisations
from a few individual cases which were perhaps exceptional. Yet it must
be agreed that one’s general impression of the higher clergy is not very
inspiring.

As for the lower clergy, it is also extremely difficult to form an opinion,
owing to the absence of studies which make a careful analysis of the
situation in a given region and are not mere collections of anecdotes. It is
clear that in many places the lower secular clergy could not rise to their
task, and their lack of education, their vulgarity and even their violence
have long been criticised. Bom of the people to whom they were still very
close, the lower clergy had too often continued in their uncouth, good-
natured customs, taking part in their pleasures and even in their games,
dances and quarrels. Sometimes, perhaps, this attitude was misplaced,

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

but it did make the lower clergy really popular in the best sense of the
word. More serious, however, was the problem of the swarms of clerics
on the very threshold of holy orders, without any recognised ties with a
congregation, sometimes of no fixed abode, and always on the watch for
mischief. These pseudo-clerics were a thorn in the flesh, and caused the
authorities much anxiety. We must also admit that in general the intellec-
tual qualities of the lower clergy left much to be desired : the ‘ manuals for
the use of priests ’ were at that time inadequate means to intellectual ad-
vancement. The humanists of the Renaissance flung gibe after gibe at these
unprententious works. Yet they had long been quite adequate to sustain
the zeal of the lower clergy as well as the humble faithful in country dis-
tricts. It must also be admitted that there were reprehensible practices
among the country clergy: too many of them lived in concubinage, for
example. These facts come down to us not only through the fiery sermons
that were preached — these may sometimes be suspected of exaggeration
— but also through the registers of the ecclesiastical courts. There is no
question of concealing these undoubted blemishes. But attention should
also be drawn to the dire poverty of these country priests : the Epistola de
miseria curatorum was no mere literary exercise.

The same imperfections prevailed among the regular clergy, who showed
clear signs of decline. Antagonism between the various orders, and bitter
rivalries between the regular and secular clergy brought to them all
considerable loss of prestige and influence. As for the material wealth of
the monasteries, published research gives very contradictory impressions.
As regards both England 1 and Germany, exhaustive studies would have
to be made before one could give an opinion on this problem, and in all
probability it would reveal marked regional differences.

In view of all this, what was becoming of that reform of the Church which
was, as we have seen, one of the leitmotives of the Papacy? It has to be
granted that the Papacy was unable to give the reforming movement any
strong impetus or even a rudimentary coherence. That is why the praise-
worthy endeavours of the Bursfeld Congregation, like those of the Dutch
Congregation, produced only insignificant and, above all, short-lived
results. As for the methods adopted by the Congregation of Montaigu or
the canons of Windesheim, they were unlikely to be effective and, what is
more, they met with insuperable opposition. With the possible exceptions
of Spain and England the situation had scarcely improved, and yet, now
more than ever, people everywhere were genuinely athirst for reform.
Occasionally, a sovereign made a show of taking the long-desired reform
into his own hands: he would summon assembly after assembly and have
plans and programmes drawn up, but not without ulterior motives — and it
was in this way that the king of France called a reform commission at

1 A. Hamilton Thompson, The English Clergy and their Organization in the later Middle
Ages (Oxford, 1947) — a work which perhaps generalises rather too much.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Tours in November 1493. While the results produced should not be dis-
regarded, they did not lead to any real change for the better.

The whole undertaking should have been initiated by the Papacy and
prosecuted with indomitable tenacity. At one time it seemed as though
Rome had realised that this was so. In fact the Lateran Council opened
by Julius II in 1512, in very troubled times, announced in the course of
sessions held in a calmer atmosphere that it intended to tackle this re-
demptive work. There was much to be done in every sphere and at every
level of the hierarchy, from the Roman Curia down to the lowliest country
cleric.

An emphatic bull issued on 5 May 1514 took some sensible measures,
particularly in regard to the frequently criticised abuses of the Commendam,
a running sore in the Church : the Commendam was to be granted only in
quite exceptional circumstances and those to whom it was granted were to
be subject in their stewardships to certain fixed rules. These were excellent
clauses, but were unfortunately hardly ever put into practice. Other parts
of the bull were an attempt to restrain the cardinals from their tendency
to make a show of their ever-increasing extravagance, but one can well
see how difficult it was for a pope as prodigal as Leo X to enforce pro-
visions of this kind. There were also a few sound clauses on the reform of
morals and in favour of a more enlightened kind of devotion: these
provided for severer penalties for the blasphemy, sorcery and superstition
which were rife everywhere. But belief in magic was widespread: the
Malleus maleficarum characterises the spirit of the times. The vast majority
believed in witchcraft, and this attitude was to persist for many years. It
was realised that it was necessary to instruct not only the faithful, but
first of all the clergy themselves. Until then the education given to most
of the clergy, particularly the lower clergy, was very poor, despite local
endeavours which were noteworthy in some cases. For example, the end
of the fifteenth century saw in England, and particularly at Cambridge,
the foundation of theological colleges and institutions to promote the
education of preachers. Printing, which had been in use since the middle
of the fifteenth century, was of course called into service, but it was a
two-edged sword, since it could also be used to disseminate questionable
ideas. The council realised this, and forbade the printing of any book
not sanctioned by the officially appointed ecclesiastical authorities. In
short, these clauses attacked the problem piecemeal and were far from
courageous.

The council was also disturbed by a fresh outbreak of the old struggle
between the bishops and the regular clergy and especially between the
bishops and the mendicant orders, which had shown great vitality in days
gone by. The opposing parties were never short of arguments and in their
dispute words sometimes ran high: but the regular clergy eventually
agreed to a reduction of a few altogether inordinate privileges, some of

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE PAPACY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

which had been granted during the pontificate of Sixtus IV. If this had
not come about, episcopal order in its entirety would have been perilously
weakened, as public order was disturbed by the abuse of prophecy of
which far too many preachers were guilty. On many occasions, these
preachers had been undoubtedly courageous and remarkably sensitive
to the needs of society: in France, for example, the outspoken Olivier
Maillard had not bowed to the most overbearing kings, and in every
country there were men who emulated him. But side by side with such
powerful figures there were many harmful individuals: preachers, and
even pseudo-preachers, poured out unorthodox ideas and predicted ap-
palling disasters in order to terrorise those who listened to them — dan-
gerous words which ran away with their speakers and often led to panic
and rioting. A close watch had to be kept on these popular orators, and
this the council realised. 1

On 1 6 March 1517 there took place the last session of that memorable
council which had lasted five years, and was a kind of sudden awakening
for the Church at a critical moment in its history. Had the Papacy,
heedful of the voice of Christendom, done what was needed towards the
long-awaited reform? Had it regained its prestige? Had it recovered, and
did it enjoy a high reputation at a time when Luther was about to come
on the scene? In concluding this chapter, we shall try to give a clear
answer to these questions.

Bad pontificates following each other in seemingly endless succession,
the warlike passions of Julius II, the extravagance of Leo X — these were
hardly propitious factors in the situation. Even if the masses still had some
regard for it, the moral reputation of the Papacy was nevertheless shaken.
It was all the more severely shaken on account of the low esteem into which
the court of Rome had fallen. Even if allowance is made for the prevailing
spirit of the age, it must be admitted that this court abounded in disgrace-
ful conduct; the frequently inordinate luxury enjoyed by certain cardinals,
some of whom, by reason of their age and bearing, were incapable of
inspiring respect, served only to accentuate the poverty of the lower
clergy in every country. Political intrigue, nepotism beyond all measure,
unscrupulousness in all things, simony that was often blatant — these are
things which, from a distance, become rather dimmed by the dazzling
radiance of the Renaissance; but for the people of the time, they were
unbearable. The thirst for earthly pleasures displayed by the most prominent
members of the papal court necessitated the spending of ever larger sums.
Hence the adoption of oppressive fiscal measures and the most dangerous
financial expedients ; hence, too, the importance of the bankers who were
constantly in the background of the policy of Rome. Except in Italy, of

1 The great influence these preachers exerted upon the masses is brought to light by
a number of recent monographs devoted to particular preachers.

9 93 !»CMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

course, the humbler classes had little knowledge of all these matters
or could only hazard a vague guess at them through allusions made by
preachers, but the more advanced sections of society did not remain in
ignorance of them. The wealthy, educated middle classes gladly read
pamphlets and satires written by the humanists who were to be found
everywhere. Very few, no doubt, of the writers were unbelievers and very
few went to the limits of boldness, but their criticisms struck home hard
and everyone could see that they were perfectly justified. The rulers,
leaning on the earliest nationalist feelings, which were hostile to Rome,
were to try to turn this widespread rancour and bitterness to good account.
It would be easy for them to show that the two goals the Church intended
to attain at the time it rallied round Nicholas V — crusade abroad and reform
at home — not only had not been attained but seemed to be retreating
farther away.

Indeed, there could no longer seriously be any question of a crusade.
It is true that in 1518-19 Leo X was still talking of a crusade, trumpeting
forth the Brotherhood of the Holy Crusade, estimating its resources and
drawing up plans; but few people believed that he was sincere. The
Turkish threat had not disappeared — far from it — but the Turks were no
longer regarded with the abhorrence of earlier times. The popes themselves
had dealings with them — sometimes in connection with the meanest
haggling, as for example over the unfortunate Djem affair — and the
Christian kings followed suit. And the tithes destined for the Crusade
had been too often appropriated for any and every object for public
opinion to be enthusiastic. The Crusade was dead indeed.

What was more serious still was that the Church gave the impression
of being unable to achieve the reform that was on every lip and in every
heart. The pope had indeed overcome the supporters of conciliar ideas,
but his absolutism, which was henceforth blazoned abroad, did not afford
him complete protection from criticism. And what may be said of the
College of Cardinals? The selection of nominees in the time of Leo X was
on the whole almost as deplorable as in the reign of the worst of his pre-
decessors. In truth, Rome was completely absorbed in the building of
St Peter’s : as we have seen, the preaching of indulgences was instituted
to provide the necessary money, while many more urgent tasks awaited
attention. In the midst of this feverish building and this sumptuous,
refined way of life, how could serious thought be given to reforming the
morals of the clergy and their flocks? At a time when the religious feeling
of the masses was still intense, the neglect and indolence of the court of
Rome were bitterly resented. The indifferent would have shrugged their
shoulders, but there were none— or very few — who were indifferent at the
beginning of the sixteenth century.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER V

LEARNING AND EDUCATION IN
WESTERN EUROPE FROM 1470 TO 1520

W hatever its ultimate origins, it is undisputed that the intellec-
tual movement which eventually blossomed into the Renaissance
began to be first noticeable in Italy during the fourteenth century.
Its real development occurred, however, during the fifteenth century.
By 1450 humanism had already been dominating Italian culture for some
time, and during the second half of the century it began to penetrate north
of the Alps. Outside Italy, however, humanist development followed
different lines from those pursued in its country of origin. This was only
natural, since whereas in Italy humanism had gradually grown out of
medieval learning, in the other countries of western Europe it was suddenly
brought to bear upon the structure of different traditions. Inevitably,
there were occasional clashes between the followers of the new ideas and
the upholders of the older ones. Humanism was to prevail, and by 1520
it had considerably changed the intellectual life of western Europe.

The political structure of Italy made humanism take pronounced local
characteristics in its various centres. At Naples, Urbino, Mantua, Ferrara,
and Milan, humanism assumed a courtly complexion. In Rome humanism
naturally found inspiration in the ancient ruins, showed little interest in
Greek before the days of Leo X, and gravitated towards the papal court,
just as in Florence the patronage of the Medici drew the leading scholars
within their orbit. In Venice, on the other hand, the pursuit of the
humanities, which incidentally showed a strong bias in favour of Greek
studies, was confined to some members of the nobility, to some scholars
engaged in school teaching, and to the learned men assisting Aldus with
his publications. The development of humanism in fifteenth-century Italy
had been made much easier by the greater accessibility of books. Many
new libraries were founded at Florence, Naples, Cesena, Urbino, Venice
and elsewhere, while some of the older ones (the Vatican collection of
books is a notable example) were completely reorganised and brought
up to date. Such a considerable library development had been made
possible by the favourable economic climate, and also by the improved
methods in the mass producing of manuscript texts. Just when these
methods had reached their highest efficiency, the invention of printing
brought about a revolution in book production. An important result of
this invention was a spate of editions of the ancient classics; over two
hundred editions of Cicero and seventy of Virgil were printed in Italy
before 1500. Thanks to printing, the leading humanists were now able to

95 9-a

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

release the texts of the ancient writers as they had already corrected and
emended them, as well as preparing texts especially for the printers. This
was a field in which the highest standards were reached in Venice at the
very end of the fifteenth century, when Aldus’s press began to pour out a
steady stream of Greek and Latin classics edited by the best humanist
skill available.

The classical emphasis in education introduced by the humanists did
not lead to a sudden weeding out of medieval handbooks. Even as late
as the early sixteenth century, the manuals by Everard of Bethune and
Alexander of Villedieu were still in use, though by then they had been
replaced in most schools by ‘he new grammars by Perotti, Sulpizio, and
Mancinelli. The simultaneous presence of medieval and new elements, so
noticeable in school teaching, was also to be found at the universities. At
the beginning of the sixteenth century the organisation of Italian uni-
versities was still that of the Middle Ages. At Bologna, for instance, the
arts faculty still followed the divisions of the trivium and quadrivium, and
both there and at Padua Aristotle was supreme, while the writings of the
Greek and Arabic natural philosophers had lost none of their old prestige
with the physicians. Yet side by side with a good deal of traditional
learning, one could also find at the universities the new values of humanism.
Politian at Florence, Beroaldo, Codro Urceo and Bombasio at Bologna,
Leonico Tomeo and Romolo Amaseo at Padua, taught side by side with
theologians and canon lawyers scarcely affected by the new intellectual
fashions. What actually happened at the universities was a working com-
promise, by which the old and new traditions were able to work together
in harmony for a long time and without too much rivalry. The organisation
of the universities made it easy for humanist ideals to percolate via the
arts faculties into law, medicine, and theology. It was left to the academies
to provide the humanists with opportunities for discussions and exchanges
with their fdlow-scholars and patrons. The earliest humanist academy
had been started informally in Naples by Antonio Panormita in the days
of Alfonso V (d. 1458), in order to discuss all kinds of subjects, mostly
connected with classical antiquity. On the other hand, the Florentine or
Platonic Academy led by Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) and his Medici
patrons, was inspired by the cult of Plato and was responsible for many of
the peculiar features in the intellectual life of Florence during the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A role similar to that of Ficino in
Florence was played in Rome by Pomponio Leto (1425-98), whose
Accademia Romana was entirely dominated by archaeological interests.
Sent ‘underground’ in 1468 by Paul II (1464-71), who saw a threat to
Christianity in its harmless paganising, Leto’s academy came into the
light again under Sixtus IV (1471-84), when the leading officials of the
Curia belonged to it. Its heyday was, however, in the days of Leo X
(1513-21), when it enjoyed the pope’s patronage. Somewhat different

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

from the other Italian academies, the one at Venice presided over by Aldus
proved particularly interested in Hellenism and quickly achieved a great
reputation and connections throughout Europe.

One effect of humanism was that classical antiquity could occasionally
continue to be also a source of inspiration in politics and political thought
as it had during the Middle Ages. It was the ancient world as seen through
Livy and Polybius that lay underneath Machiavelli’s treatises, in which
ancient history suggested rules of conduct in contemporary affairs. Ro-
mantic memories of republican Rome could, moreover, still prove quite
efficacious, in a very few cases, in arousing feeling against despotic rule.
Thus the humanist teaching of Cola Monatano led directly to the murder
of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, duke of Milan, in 1476, while the haunting
example of Brutus was among the causes which encouraged Pier Paolo
Boscoli and his associates to conspire against the Medici in 1513. But the
great majority of humanists were definitely on the side of their rulers,
indeed some of them, such as Jacopo Antiquario in Milan, Gioviano
Pontano in Naples, and Bartolomeo Scala in Florence, reached very high
state office. These activities are certainly not surprising, particularly when
we recall not only the frequent employment of humanists for political
propaganda, but also their position in the disputes about the advantages
of the active and the contemplative life. This had been one of the issues
dominating philosophical speculation in fifteenth-century Florence, which
found its fullest statement in Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camal-
dulenses, a work completed about 1475. Another subject arousing as
much interest in late fifteenth-century humanist circles was the position of
man. It was thus left to Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) to bring forth a
revaluation of man’s intellectual freedom and the relevance of his position
in the universe, further contributions to the discussion being furnished by
Pomponazzi and Ficino.

This exaltation of human dignity was not meant to be an attack against
religion. Both Pico della Mirandola and Ficino were men of deep piety,
and most humanists had genuine religious feelings. It was certainly not
unusual for the scholars meeting in the academies to take part in the pious
exercises of lay religious brotherhoods, and throughout the Age of
Humanism the study of the Fathers was certainly not neglected. Hence
the reaction of Savonarola against classicism was above all a revivalist
movement striving to establish a narrow Puritanism in a climate which was
obviously favourable to the new learning and what it stood for. Savona-
rola’s failure was not a failure of Christianity ; and even those humanists
who opposed him were certainly not hostile to the Church. If there was
one thing towards which some of them felt definitely ill-disposed, this was
rather the vernacular language or, more exactly, its use in literature.
Politian and his patron Lorenzo de’ Medici (better known as the Magni-
ficent, 1449-92) had not been amongst them; in fact their literary remains

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

include some of the best Italian verse written during the fifteenth century.
Moreover, during the early sixteenth century this hostility to the vernacular
had already narrowed down to a small though very vocal clique, and just
when Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) was showing how to express the spirit
of humanism in both Latin and Italian, Castiglione (1478-1529) was
drawing his unforgettable picture of the ideal Renaissance man in the
language spoken daily at the Roman court, while Ariosto (1474-1533)
was giving poetic life to what was best in humanism in his Orlando
Furioso.

The struggle between the followers of Latin and those of Italian was
just one aspect of the battle between the ancients and modems. Another
issue was to split the classicists themselves into Ciceronians and Anti-
ciceronians, and came to a head with Angelo Ambrogini sumamed
Poliziano or, as we call him, Politian (1454-94). Endowed with very
great critical powers, exquisite taste, a powerful imagination, and high
poetic gifts, Politian proved easily the greatest poet and classical scholar
of his age. It was Politian who really initiated the channelling of classical
scholarship into more modern lines, and, as if such an achievement was
not enough, he also displayed a mastery of Greek far superior to that of
any Byzantine refugee then in Italy. He was also the first to show (in his
Rusticus, an inaugural lecture in Latin verse to his course on Hesiod and
the Georgies ) an appreciation of Virgil’s Georgies and of late classical
Latin literature, and to consider the ancient writers from the aesthetic as
well as the antiquarian point of view. That Ciceronianism was ultimately
a subordination of one’s own personality to the principle of imitation,
in fact the very negation of style, was vigorously put forward by Politian,
who absolutely refused to worship at the Ciceronian shrine. Such a stand
was not an isolated one. Ermolao Barbaro also assumed a position
hostile to Cicero, while Filippo Beroaldo chose the meretricious prose of
Apuleius as his own model. Of course all this aroused opposition at
once. Politian’s stand was openly censured by Bartolomeo Scala and was
the subject of a spirited attack by Paolo Cortese. Despite the great prestige
of some of the Anticiceronians, Ciceronianism was still supreme as late
as 1520. Its greatest exponent in Italy at the time, Pietro Bembo, went
even as far as formulating its rules during his controversy with Gian-
francesco Pico on the subject of imitation, which took place in 15 12-13.
All the same Politian’s views were eventually to be vindicated by Erasmus
in the Ciceronianus, that devastating satire on Cicero’s devotees, first
published in 1528.

Among the most lasting achievements of Italian humanism between
1470 and 1520, three are particularly worth noting. They are its contri-
butions to textual criticism, classical archaeology, and Greek studies.
Some striking advance in the criticism of texts had already been achieved
by Lorenzo Valla during the first half of the fifteenth century. It was

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I470-I520

nevertheless with Politian that the scholarly examination of manuscripts,
attention to palaeographical evidence, orthography and the ‘usus scri-
bendi ’, were first conducted in a thorough and systematic way. Modern
textual criticism really started with Politian, and his methods may be seen
at their best in his Miscellanea. They were made even more scientific by
his pupil Pietro Crinito. In archaeology the real pioneer had been Biondo
Flavio (1392-1463), who had attempted in his Roma instaurata to supply
a topographical reconstruction of ancient Rome, while classical epigraphy
had been considerably advanced in Biondo’s time by the researches of
Ciriaco d’ Ancona and Giovanni Marcanova. The achievements of these
early epigraphists found many continuators between 1470 and 1520,
among whom Felice Feliciano and Fra Giocondo of Verona are worth
mentioning. Biondo’s labours were taken over by Pomponio Leto and
several members of his academy, thanks to whom the study of Roman
remains acquired new strength. Further stimulus to archaeological re-
search was given by the discovery of such important masterpieces as the
Apollo of Belvedere during the pontificate of Innocent VIII and the
Laocoon in 1505. The writings of Francesco Albertini (e.g. his successful
Opusculum de Mirabilibus Novae Urbis Romae, 1510) and Andrea Fulvio
(e.g. his Antiquaria Urbis, Rome, 1513; lllustrium Imagines, Rome, 1517;
De Urbis Antiquitatibus, Rome, 1527) reflect the antiquarian outlook of
early sixteenth-century Rome, an outlook also responsible for the am-
bitious schemes of excavation outlined by Raphael in his report to Pope
Leo X in 1519. The assembling of collections of ancient objects and par-
ticularly works of art, not unknown during the early fifteenth century,
became almost a mania in Florence, Rome and Venice by the first decade
of the sixteenth century. The best of these collections were naturally
owned by popes and princes ; yet even private scholars like Pietro Bembo
and Angelo Colocci were able to assemble very impressive numbers of
antiques, which aroused the admiration and envy of their contemporaries.

Renaissance archaeology was prevalently Roman. The study of Greek
remains, so vigorously initiated by Ciriaco d’Ancona during the first half
of the fifteenth century, was quickly brought to a standstill by the Turkish
conquest of the Greek world. One of the effects of this conquest was also
the pouring of crowds of refugees into Italy, many of whom were gifted
scholars anxious for academic employment. The view that these refugees
brought Greek back to western Europe can of course no longer be
accepted. It is nevertheless undeniable that several of them made valuable
contributions to Greek studies in Italy and elsewhere. By 1470 these
pursuits had already reached a considerable development in Italy, though
even then knowledge of Greek was not as widely spread as one might
think, and not every large centre could offer facilities for its study. For
instance, Pietro Bembo had to go to Messina in 1492 to secure a good
knowledge of the language at the school of Constantine Lascaris. Never-

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

theless Greek was rapidly becoming a recognised university subject, and
the available refugee talent was employed in university and other teaching
activities. Greek refugees such as Johannes Argyropoulos, Andronicus
Callistus, the two Lascaris, and Marcus Musurus, taught in Italian uni-
versities side by side with Italian hellenists such as Politian and Codro
Urceo. The greatest translating achievement of the second half of the
fifteenth century, the Latin version of the Corpus Platonicum, first printed
in Florence in 1484, was none the less the work not of a Byzantine but of
an Italian, the Florentine Marsilio Ficino. It was shortly after 1470 that
the lack of efficient instruments for learning Greek began to be felt
particularly acutely and was eventually remedied. Even Politian and
Pico della Mirandola had been forced to learn their Greek with bilingual
texts, since no proper grammars and dictionaries existed. Accordingly
the publication of a Greek grammar written in Latin by Urbano Bolzanio
in 1497 and of a Graeco-Latin dictionary by Giovanni Crestone about
1478 proved decisive in the history of Renaissance Greek. At the same
time the comparative rarity of Greek manuscripts became much less
irksome, thanks to the growth of Greek printing, which made possible
the issue of editions of the principal Greek classics by the presses of Milan,
Florence and, above all, Venice.

One result of the pursuit of Greek learning by the Italians was an
interesting development in philosophical thought. The humanist inter-
pretation of Aristotle and the new discovery of Plato were principally
responsible for the new trends in philosophical speculation which were
followed at Padua, Bologna, and Florence. The supremacy of Aristotle
in the first two of these towns was natural in such prominent university
centres. At Florence, on the other hand, Platonism predominated, thanks
to Ficino and his associates. Controversy between Platonists and Aris-
totelians had been raging since about 1450-60. Cardinal Bessarion’s
spirited defence of Plato published in Rome in 1469 gives a good picture
of what was at stake. The struggle had, however, been mainly fought
among humanists rather than professional philosophers, the latter pre-
ferring to follow the principles laid down by the schoolmen. Thus what
prevailed in Padua until the very end of the fifteenth century, and to some
extent even after, was an Averroist and naturalist tradition, contrasting
strikingly with the spiritual approach of the Florentines. An attack on
the very heart of this tradition was delivered by Politian’s friend, the
Venetian patrician Ermolao Barbaro (1454-93), whose hostility to scholas-
ticism found expression in the belief that it was essential to study Aristotle
directly from the Greek original and not from old translations. The
efforts of Barbaro, who was also responsible for very important work on
the text of Pliny the Elder, were successful, so much so that lectures on
the Greek text of Aristotle were already being delivered in the University
of Padua by Leonico Tomeo in 1497. The strongest efforts to dislodge

100

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

the medieval Aristotle came, however, not from Barbaro but from Platonist
Florence. Broadly speaking, Ficino’s Platonism was ultimately a re-
valuation of moral problems in opposition to the prevailing naturalism,
as well as a humanist interpretation of Christianity. As such, this Chris-
tian Platonism was not without influence upon contemporary and later
theology. The writings of Egidio da Viterbo (1465-1532), the great
Augustinian theologian, show the influence of Florentine Platonism on
divinity, while even so conservative a Thomist as Cardinal Tommaso da
Vio, better known as Cajetan (1468-1533), found it imperative to take
into account the intellectual tendencies of his own time in interpreting
the thought of Aquinas. The impact of humanism upon scholasticism
appears perhaps at its best in the strange and pathetic figure of Pico della
Mirandola. The outlook of Pico, his tastes, his very terminology, belong
to scholastic tradition, and equally medieval are his love of allegory and
interest in the Jewish Cabbala. Yet for all this, his encyclopaedism had at
the same time a true humanist range, just as his extremely ambitious
attempt to reconcile the basic harmony of all religions and philosophies
went well beyond the wildest dreams of the schoolmen.

Barbaro, Ficino, and Pico were, though in different ways, all rebels
against the speculative trends fashionable at Padua and Bologna, where
the naturalistic approach to Aristotle had dominated philosophical specu-
lation during most of the fifteenth century. What was pursued at Padua
was, however, not so much the genuine Aristotelian thought as rather the
travesty of it supplied by the medieval commentators. Thus it was not
Aristotle but Averroes’s materialist interpretation of his doctrines that
supplied foundations for the theories of Nicoletto Vernia (1420-99), who
held a chair at Padua from 1468 to 1499. It was Vernia who, by stressing
that physics ought to be separated from metaphysics, really came to
uphold for the first time the absolute autonomy of science. He lacked,
however, the humanist sympathies of Alessandro Achillini (1463-1512),
whose independent Averroism allowed nevertheless some room for human
individuality. It was left instead to Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525) to
show a novel approach to Aristotle through Alexander of Aphrodisias in
a Renaissance climate. Deeply convinced of the dialectical irreconci-
lability between faith and philosophy, Pomponazzi even dared to conclude
that it was impossible to prove that the human soul was immortal, and
that one could only say at most that it was absolutely mortal and only
relatively immortal. Yet at the same time he shared with Ficino a lively
interest in the ultimate destiny of man, a subject to which he dedicated
much of his thought. Pomponazzi was doubtless the most acute philo-
sophical mind of his time, and though his sympathies were on the whole
humanistic, he really represents the logical development of that Paduan
naturalist Averroism which was to dominate philosophy in Padua until
the end of the sixteenth century.

101

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Another field that aroused particular interest in Padua from the last
quarter of the fifteenth century was Hebrew philosophy, thanks chiefly
to Elia del Medigo, the Jewish scholar who exerted so great an influence
upon Pico della Mirandola. Pico was also instrumental in stimulating an
interest in Hebrew and Oriental languages. Among these, Arabic was
particularly studied by Pico’s friend Girolamo Ramusio (1450-86), while
the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics also attracted the interest of some
humanists, particularly within the circle of Ficino, and stimulated some
of the forgeries by Annio da Viterbo (published in Rome in 1498) and
eventually also a treatise on hieroglyphics by Pierio Valeriano (completed
in 1556). On the other hand, the study of Roman law only ceased to be
pursued on medieval lines after 1520, in spite of the fact that both
Lorenzo Valla and later Politian had also given their attention to the
text of the Pandects. This may be explained by the conservatism of the
lawyers and by the traditional hostility of most humanists to legal studies,
which made them look with distaste at anything connected with law.

French humanism developed comparatively late. It is true that as early
as the last quarter of the fourteenth century intellectual fashions from
Italy had found a few followers in France. But the promising efforts of
Nicholas de Clemanges, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier and Pierre Col, and
their friends were soon forgotten during the desolation brought about by
the final stages of the Hundred Years War. Thus until the second half of
the fifteenth century the new conceptions of scholarship fashionable in
Italy failed to attract the French mind again. The traditional scholastic
approach to knowledge was good enough to satisfy the intellectual ap-
petite of the country, while the French genius preferred to express itself
in the spoken tongue, in the poems of Villon and the euphuistic compo-
sitions of the rhetoriqueurs. Even when a humanist outlook developed in
France, it only affected at first a very small though admittedly a far from
insignificant group. Throughout the period 1470-1520 school teaching
clung tenaciously to the old traditions, old text-books like the Graecismus
and the Doctrinale losing none of their former popularity. An old-
fashioned outlook prevailed also at the universities, although some room
for the new ideas was provided. Paris, for instance, was then still very
much an international centre of learning and the leading theological
school in Europe, with a great majority among its regent masters showing
hardly any interest in intellectual novelties. What divided the university
during the last quarter of the fifteenth century was not whether the new
studies should be accepted or not, but the struggle between Nominalists
and Realists. In 1474 the long campaign of the Realists against their
opponents had led to an official condemnation and prohibition of Nomi-
nalist doctrines. Yet the defeated party had not given up the struggle,
with the result that in 1481 the interdict was finally lifted, and Nominalism

102

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, 147O-I52O

was henceforth to enjoy a real supremacy in Paris until scholasticism was
finally laughed out of the universities in the days of Rabelais. The Nomi-
nalists strenuously opposed Platonism as well as Realism, scarcely showing
any greater readiness to compromise than their opponents. The atmo-
sphere was by no means liberal. Astrology, for instance, was formally
condemned by the university in 1494, while during the reign of Louis XII
the royal policy against freedom of thought was felt to such an extent in
academic circles, that even the orthodox Jean de Standonck, the re-founder
of the College de Montaigu, was banished in 1499 for some opinons he
had been rash enough to utter. By then the humanist influence had been
at work for some time in the university, particularly in the faculty of arts.
The Paris teaching of Gregorio Tifemate in 1456-8 had shown some
aspects of the humanism of Italy to the schoolmen, and more emphasis
on this subject had been given by Filippo Beroaldo while in Paris in
1476-8. Such opportunities were certainly not lost on Robert Gaguin and
some of his friends, and that this was so is also evident from the nature
of the books issued from the printing press installed in one of the cellars
of the Sorbonne in 1470 by the university librarian Guillaume Fichet and
his associate Jean Heynlen. Characteristically enough, their series of
publications started with the Latin epistles of an Italian humanist,
Gasparino Barzizza, this first volume being followed by other classical
and humanist texts, such as Barzizza’s Orthographia, Sallust, Florus, and
Fichet’s own Rhetorica. In short, humanist enthusiasm was respon-
sible for the beginnings of printing in France, and nowhere in the whole
country was this enthusiasm higher than among Robert Gaguin and his
friends. An old pupil of Gregorio Tifemate, Robert Gaguin (1433-1501)
was a keen Ciceronian who envisaged a union of knowledge and eloquence
leading to the advancement of theology. This he strove to achieve not only
with his numerous writings, in which he tried to conform to his Italian
models, but also through his personal influence, which proved very
powerful indeed. Little wonder, then, that Gaguin’s circle was the cradle
of French humanism, a humanism which was not opposed to, but rather
within the orbit of, scholasticism and showing a definite flair for grammar
and rhetoric.

In view of Gaguin’s prominent academic position in Paris, it is scarcely
surprising that many of the foreign scholars who resorted there (the
young Erasmus and many Italians were among them) should eagerly have
sought his favour. Another person they tried to ingratiate themselves
with was the Italian-born archbishop of Vienne, Angelo Cato (c. 1440-96),
a most influential member of Gaguin’s circle, who stood high in the king’s
favour. It was to Cato that Domenico Mancini addressed from Beau-
gency, on 1 December 1483, a highly dramatic account of the usurpation
of Richard III, and it was only natural, in view of his exalted position,
that Cato should have been chosen to arbitrate in 1487 in the dispute

103

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

between Guillaume Tardif and Gerolamo Balbo. Balbo had appeared in
Paris about 1484, intending to set up a monopoly of humanist teaching
on Italian lines. His scandalous conduct against Tardif and later against
his Italian colleagues Andrelini and Vitelli made it imperative for him to
leave Paris in haste in 1491, to the relief of his fellow teachers. Cornelio
Vitelli, after lecturing on the humanities for a few months in 1488-9, also
preferred to leave for England. It was left instead to Fausto Andrelini
(c. 1462-1518) to settle in France, where his popularity as a humanist
lecturer was only surpassed by that of Gerolamo Aleandro (1480-1542),
whose Paris courses on Greek and Latin authors started in 1508. Another
Italian scholar who exerted some influence and found success in France
during this period was Paolo Emilio of Verona (c. 1460-1529) who, after
arriving in 1483 in order to read theology in Paris, took up the study of
French history and antiquities, becoming eventually royal historiographer
and the author of a history of France published in 1517 and written in
accordance with the principles of humanist historiography.

The success of Italian scholars like Andrelini, Aleandro, and Paolo
Emilio, speaks clearly for the appreciation of humanist values in late
fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Paris. This is confirmed by the kind
of books then appearing in print. Although French publishers (among
whom should be particularly noted the scholarly Jodocus Badius, who had
studied in Italy) issued a large number of volumes dealing with scholastic
learning, devotion, and literature in the vernacular, they also published
a very considerable number of classical and humanist texts. Strangely
enough, the Italian wars begun by Charles VIII did not at once
lead to closer links between the two countries. On the other hand,
these wars did bring a considerable increase in the number of books
available in France, through the wholesale removal to France of the
Sforza library from Pavia. Another result was the arrival of the Greek
refugee scholar Johannes Lascaris, who also proved invaluable to
Louis XII as a diplomatic agent, and of the humanist poet Jacopo
Sannazzaro, who found some reward for his exile in the discovery of
some long-forgotten poems by Ovid and Nemesianus. It was just on the
eve of the Italian wars that the humanist study of Greek became notice-
able in France. Gregorio Tifemate’s teaching in Paris had included some
instruction in that tongue, but his teaching came too early to leave a
deep mark. Gaguin, who had been Gregorio’s pupil, certainly did not go
very far with his Greek. It was in fact only from 1476 that Greek was
taught again in Paris, thanks to the presence there of the Greek refugee
George Hermonymos. Hermonymos was admittedly an incompetent
teacher. All the same he left a large number of distinguished pupils —
Bude, Reuchlin, and Erasmus among them — whom he had introduced,
however badly, to Greek learning. A further step in the teaching of Greek
in France was the courses held in Paris in 1507-9 by Francois Tissard,

104

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

who also had several Greek texts especially printed by Gilles de Gourmont
during these years for use among his pupils. The regular teaching of
Greek in the University of Paris was, however, only started in 1508, when
Gerolamo Aleandro, the future cardinal and papal representative at
Worms, started his courses there.

Among those Frenchmen who took up the study of Greek with en-
thusiasm one should certainly mention Jean de Pins, who had studied at
Bologna under such accomplished masters as Beroaldo, whose life he had
written, and Codro Urceo. Another who drew much inspiration from
Greek learning, though he never had a thorough mastery of the tongue,
was Jacques Lefevre d’fitaples (c. 1450-1536). Lefevre’s links with
Politian, Ermolao Barbaro and Pico della Mirandola had acquainted
him with what was best in Italian humanism. He remained, however, to
the end not so much a classical scholar as a humanist theologian, whose
intellectual interests did not exclude the schoolmen and whose works also
included editions of Nicholas of Cusa, Richard of St Victor and medieval
Flemish mystics. He was also capable of following the new approach to
Aristotle, doubtless inspired by Ermolao Barbaro, which was openly
against the traditions of the medieval schools. His aim here was to enable
people to know the real Aristotle and not the one deformed by medieval
commentators, an aim which is already evident as early as 1493 in his
Paraphrasis in Aristotelis octo physicos libros. At a later stage in his career
he tried to do for the whole of divinity what he had done for Aristotle.
What he envisaged now was nothing less than a thorough reform of
theology and, in addition, the placing of the early Fathers at the disposal
of those who had no Greek. It was with these goals in view that he
issued a Latin version of Damascene in 1 507 and an edition of the Psalms
one year later. It was with his commentary on the Pauline epistles,
published in 1512, in which he still defended the authenticity of the
spurious correspondence between Seneca and St Paul, that Lefevre re-
vealed his theological thought in all its depth and originality, as well as
his enthusiastic approach to biblical criticism.

Lefevre d’Etaples was undoubtedly the most brilliant French thinker
of the early sixteenth century. Yet as a scholar he certainly fell far behind
Guillaume Bude (1468-1540), particularly in Greek studies. A lawyer by
training, Bude had studied civil law at Orleans and had started to learn
Greek under Hermonymos about 1494. His real Greek teachers were,
however, Johannes Lascaris and Gerolamo Aleandro, two very great
names in contemporary humanism. In 1502-5 Bude had already turned
some of Plutarch’s treatises into Latin. But his real gifts were disclosed
in full only in 1508, when there appeared his Annotationes in Pandectas,
where he did not hide his contempt for the medieval interpreters of Roman
law. The De Asse published in 1515 shows Bude’s scholarly qualities and
his grasp of classical antiquity at their highest. It placed its author at

105

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

once among the foremost scholars of his day. In this amazing work,
which supplied for the first time a scholarly and reliable account of the
Roman monetary system, the choice of sources and the critical insight are
particularly astounding, when we consider the author’s background and
upbringing. Less surprising is the contempt for the vernacular, which
Bude shared with so many Italian humanists of his time. But then his
heart was entirely with the ancient classics. It was, therefore, quite
characteristic of his enthusiasm for scholarship, that upon hearing in
1517 that Francis I had it in mind to found the college of learned men
which eventually became the College de France, he should have set
himself at once to make sure that the idea was not given up, and it was
thanks to him that the king’s scheme came into being in 1530.

In late fifteenth-century England, as in France, learning and education
still conformed to the medieval pattern. Throughout the Middle Ages,
the English monasteries had played a prominent cultural role. A general
picture of English monastic life during the last quarter of the fifteenth
century shows, on the other hand, how many of the learned and edu-
cational functions previously performed by the monasteries had now been
taken over by schools and universities. It was just during this period that
new methods in grammatical teaching began to be followed at two of the
grammar schools, at Banbury and at the school attached to Magdalen
College, Oxford. The spirit behind these innovations was also noticeable
at the universities. True, the theological faculties still continued to domi-
nate academic life at Oxford and Cambridge. The supremacy of the
theologians had not, however, prevented the rise of a taste for some aspects
of humanist learning, brought over by Italian scholars and Oxford and
Cambridge graduates who had studied in Italy. The introduction of print-
ing naturally led to a revolution in the production of books. What is
noticeable in the beginnings of printing in England is that the earliest
printers, Caxton, Rood, and the mysterious ‘St Albans Schoolmaster’,
were not without some humanist sympathies. Most of their productions
were naturally meant for a wide public : nevertheless they also published a
few works linked with the New Learning, and Rood in Oxford even went
as far as issuing Aristotle’s Ethics in the Latin translation of Leonardo
Bruni in 1483 and the epistles of the Pseudo-Phalaris in that by Francesco
Aretino in 1485. Both Caxton and Rood made use of the advice of Italian
scholars resident in England, which suggests that by the last quarter of
the fifteenth century Italian humanism had made a niche for itself. In
England this new conception of learning at once manifested itself in many
ways. With John Rous (c. 141 1— 9 1) and William Botoner (of Worcester,
1415-82?) it gravitated towards antiquarianism and an enthusiasm for
British antiquity. On the other hand, with Robert Flemmyng, dean of
Lincoln (d. 1483), it also led to the learning of Greek and the writing of

106

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

indifferent Latin verse which was inspired by contemporary Italian fashions.
Such also were the scholarly activities of John Gunthorpe, dean of Wells
(d. 1498), whose formal Latin orations were modelled on the conventional
humanist oratory which he had learnt at Ferrara.

Latin grammar was one of the first branches of learning to feel the
impact of humanist influence. The new grammatical handbooks by the
Italians which were reaching England proved so popular, that they soon
aroused a feeling that the manuals used until then in school teaching were
no longer satisfactory. An intention to improve the study of Latin grammar
is obviously behind the books on this subject by John Anwykyll (d. 1487),
Master of Magdalen College School, Oxford, whose example was followed
by John Stanbridge and by Robert Whittinton in treatises which enjoyed
considerable vogue. These Latin grammars by Anwykyll, Stanbridge, and
Whittinton definitely established new ways of grammatical teaching in
England. Little wonder then, that when Colet founded St Paul’s School
in 1510 he should also have taken steps to have a Latin grammar especially
written for it by Linacre, and appointed the well-known grammarian
William Lilly, who incidentally was also an accomplished Greek scholar,
as its first High Master.

The spread of humanist learning in England also made its impact felt
at court. The rise of a taste for polished Latin in courtly circles had been
mainly due to Italian influence, exerted through papal officials and
scholars trying to attract the king’s notice. The way adopted by these
scholars to win favour was to submit fulsome panegyrics in Latin verse
and to dedicate treatises in the same language either to the king or to
persons closely linked with him. Thus Pietro Carmeliano (1450-1527)
started by sending some laudatory Latin verses to Edward IV and was
still doing so in Henry VIII’s time. Similar activities were pursued by
Giovanni Gigli, the papal collector who eventually became bishop of
Worcester in 1497, and by other Italians in London, such as Michele
Nagonio, Filippo Alberico of Mantua (who addressed a Latin poem to
Henry VII and another to Richard Fox) and Giovanni Opicio. All these
writings and the careers of Gigli and Carmeliano show the existence of
some appreciation of polite letters under the Yorkist kings. A direct
outcome of this was an even greater recognition of the political value of
good Latin. Not only did Henry VII establish the post of Latin secretary,
he also appointed Carmeliano to the new office. Under this same king
a French scholar, the Augustinian Bernard Andre, was acting as poet
laureate, and although his Latin was deservedly criticised by Erasmus, his
flattering panegyrics certainly pleased his employer. It is accordingly not
surprising to find that when Robert Gaguin issued an insulting Latin
epigram against Henry VII during a visit to England in 1489, he became
immediately the target of a shower of abusive Latin verse from the various
humanists hanging about the court. Naturally this courtly humanism was

107

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

primarily rhetorical and restricted to panegyric, formal oratory, and the
writing of fine Latin epistles. At Oxford and Cambridge, on the other
hand, it assumed a more academic outlook, though even there it began
by first manifesting itself through rhetoric. The teaching of this subject
on modem lines appears to have been initiated at Cambridge by the
Italian Franciscan Lorenzo da Savona, whose lectures were already being
delivered in 1478. Lorenzo’s Rhetorica Nova was published by Caxton
in 1479 and by the ‘St Albans Schoolmaster* in 1480. Caxton also
published an abridgement in 1480, which suggests that the work was
popular. He was followed there by another Italian, Caio Auberino, who
besides holding classes on Terence was also employed by the university
to write formal letters in Latin. It was, moreover, a Cambridge scholar
who had studied in Italy, John Doget, provost of King’s College from
1499 to 1501, who prepared an extensive commentary of Plato’s Phaedo,
in which Italian influence is certainly not absent. The greatest development
of the new cultural values during the last quarter of the fifteenth century
was to take place not at Cambridge but at Oxford, where the Italian
Stefano Surigone had already been teaching rhetoric from about 1465 to
1470. Surigone may also have taught some Greek; but whether he did or
not, the presence in Exeter College from 1490 of another Italian humanist,
Comelio Vitelli, proved undeniably stimulating to Oxford learning and
particularly to Greek studies. Greek was certainly known in fifteenth-
century England before Vitelli. Robert Flemmyng had secured some
knowledge of it at Ferrara, and William Sellyng, prior of Christ Church,
Canterbury (d. 1494), not only turned a tract of St John Chrysostom
into Latin in 1488, but was already teaching the rudiments of Greek,
which he had learnt at Bologna, in his monastery about 1472. Greek
studies had also been cultivated in the household of George Neville,
archbishop of York, until his exile to Calais in 1472; and Neville’s
secretary, John Shirwood, who became bishop of Durham in 1484, was
an accomplished Greek scholar, while a Byzantine refugee, Emanuel of
Constantinople, actually copied a Demosthenes (now at Leiden) for Neville
in 1468 and probably other texts too. Nor is it surprising to find that both
Neville and Shirwood were in touch with another Greek, namely that
George Hermonymos who eventually settled in Paris as a teacher. The
extant manuscripts copied in England by Emanuel and his fellow scribe
Johannes Serbopoulos, who was active in this country from 1484 to 1500,
indicate quite plainly a demand for such texts (and particularly for Greek
grammars) at Oxford, where William Grocin and Thomas Linacre were
almost certainly among their patrons.

The career of William Grocin (c. 1446-1519) was remarkable in many
ways. Although he wrote very little and with extreme reluctance, he
exerted a deep influence on his contemporaries. Colet, Linacre, and More
owed much to him, and even Erasmus could not but admire the fine

108

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, 147O-I52O

quality of his scholarship. The classical learning secured by Grocin in
Italy was matched by his critical powers. This was particularly shown by
his discovery, during a course of lectures he delivered on the subject in
St Paul’s Cathedral in 1501, that the De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, hitherto
attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, could not possibly be by him.
This bringing of humanist scholarship to bear upon theological studies
was not unique in England at the time. John Colet (14667-1519), who
had studied in Italy, where he had absorbed the doctrines of Ficino and
Pico and developed an enthusiasm for Plato and Plotinus, had also in-
troduced humanist learning into theological studies. This is evident not
only in his treatises, but also in his courses on the Pauline epistles delivered
in Oxford about 1496-7, where he struck a new note in biblical exegesis
by replacing the fashionable literal and allegorical interpretation with the
Italian method of considering the text as a whole. The humanist con-
ception of religion was indeed so powerful in Colet that it made him not
only reject the schoolmen in favour of the Fathers, but also envisage a
school aiming at the formation of learned Christians, a scheme he was
able to realise in 1510 with the foundation of St Paul’s School.

Compared with Grocin and Colet, Thomas Linacre (1460-1524) offers
a striking contrast. Although he shared their enthusiasm for Latin gram-
mar, his chief interests lay not in theology but in medicine. From Oxford
Linacre had gone to study medicine and the humanities in Italy, where
his Greek learning impressed those who came into contact with him.
Linacre’s Latin translation of Proclus’ De Sphaera was published in
Venice by Aldus in 1497. His real achievement lay, however, in his study
of the Greek physicians, a study which led to his turning several of Galen’s
treatises into Latin.

Grocin, Colet, Linacre, and most of their humanist friends were in
Holy Orders. It was a layman, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), who
became the most striking figure in the English humanism of his time. As
a scholar, More was really an amateur who never taught and whose
profession was the law, but he was endowed with exceptional gifts.
Brought up in the cultured atmosphere of Cardinal Morton’s household,
he had later quickly learnt Greek from Linacre. His Latin versions from
Lucian and the Greek Anthology and his study of Plato show the com-
plexion of his hellenism. Nevertheless More was far from uninterested
in theological matters; he took, for instance, a firm stand in favour of
Erasmus’s version of the Greek New Testament, and also did everything
in his power to help the study of Greek at Oxford, when it was threatened
by the more conservative schoolmen. As with Colet, so with More it
was the Neoplatonist side of the Renaissance that proved most congenial
to him. Characteristically, he was also a warm devotee of Pico, whose
life and some of whose letters he turned into his vigorous English prose.
This was a field in which he had no rivals in his day, just as his Latin

10 109 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

poetry and prose are the best produced by English humanism. It is in
the Utopia, that charming and so often misunderstood satire on the ways
of the world, that More’s humanism appears at its best, in a Latin prose
where wit, urbanity, and lightness of touch are happily matched by a
distinguished intellect.

The Utopia shows that in More’s time it was no longer essential for an
Englishman to study in Italy in order to become an accomplished humanist.
One reason for this was that by this time some of the intellectual climate of
Italy could be recaptured in London, thanks to the presence of several
learned Italians at court. For these scholars, the death of Henry VII in 1 509
was a calamity. A group of them failed to find favour with Henry VIII :
Andre, the poet laureate, had to withdraw into obscurity, while Carme-
liano was replaced in 1511 as Latin secretary by another Italian, Andrea
Ammonio, whose official duties alternated with Latin versification and
an intensive correspondence with Erasmus. Those Italians who definitely
suffered from the change of ruler included Polydore Vergil (c. 1470-1555),
who had started about 1506, with Henry VII’s encouragement, a Latin
history of England, the aim of which was to justify the Tudor monarchy
to Europe. It was Polydore who introduced into England the broad
conceptions of humanist historiography and stimulated the study of
British antiquity with his edition of Gildas. Unfortunately for him he
also incurred the enmity of Cardinal Wolsey, with the result that he
suffered imprisonment in 1515 and only succeeded in publishing his
Historia Anglica in 1534.

Despite the humanist activity going on in London and at the universities,
the latter continued to remain a scholastic preserve until the Reformation.
The real issue at Oxford and Cambridge was between the syllogistic and
allegorical methods and the new criticism of the Bible, together with a
return to the early Fathers; but at Oxford it narrowed down to a choice
between Duns Scotus and all he stood for and Greek. The reaction of the
old-fashioned divines, who regarded Greek as the very language of heresy,
broke out violently at Oxford in 1518, and it was only the great prestige
of John Fisher that averted a similar outbreak at Cambridge, where
Richard Croke inaugurated his teaching of Greek in 1518. Yet the last
two decades which witnessed the last stand of reactionary scholasticism
in the universities, saw also some significant developments in school and
university education. Colet’s founding of St Paul’s School was really a
successful compromise between the ideals of the Renaissance and those
of the Christian Middle Ages. The activities of Fisher at Cambridge and
Richard Fox at Oxford were directed to meet new needs at the universities.
What Fisher wanted was to raise Cambridge to the level of Oxford. Hence
having secured the patronage of Henry VII’s mother, the Lady Margaret
(Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby, 1443-1509), he
was able to induce her to found Christ’s College in 1 505 and provide in

110

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

her will for the founding of St John’s College. The need for trilingual
colleges, where instruction in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew was given for
the advancement of theological studies, had been felt since the end of the
thirteenth century, but nothing was done about it until the sixteenth.
Fisher saw to it that St John’s College, Cambridge, was trilingual, through
the establishment of fellowships in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. This was
no doubt one of Fisher’s great achievements. Another one was his
persuading his patroness to establish chairs of divinity at the two uni-
versities. He was very probably also responsible for Erasmus coming to
teach in Cambridge from 1511 to 1514, which naturally proved invaluable
to humanist and biblical learning in that university.

Fisher’s example was followed a few years later at Oxford by Richard
Fox, bishop of Winchester (14487-1528), whose foundation of Corpus
Christi College in 1517 gave Oxford a place where the humanities and
particularly Greek held an exalted position. Here also the ultimate aim
was to give new life to theology. It is, however, significant that the first
president of Fox’s college, John Claymond, was a keen classical scholar.
He was just the man to preside over a college where the reader in Latin
was expected to do his utmost to extirpate barbarism, and the reader in
divinity to lecture not on Aquinas or Duns Scotus, but on the early Fathers.

The influence exerted by humanism upon English learning did not
extend to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In Wales and Ireland no change
occurred in the traditional learning of those countries between 1470 and
1520. In Scotland, despite the foundation of three universities during the
fifteenth century, at St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, learning and
education remained rigidly medieval and so did university curricula until
the Reformation. The many students from Scotland who went to Italian
universities during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries remained
utterly unaffected by the new values. The only Scotsman who succumbed
to the attractions of humanism, Hector Boece (14657-1536), a friend of
Erasmus in Paris whose Latin history of Scotland modelled on Livy was
published in 1527, became, it is true, principal of the College of the Holy
Virgin in the Nativity at Aberdeen (later King’s College) in 1505. Yet
even Boece, despite his prominent academic position, failed to exert any
immediate influence upon his fellow countrymen.

During the last quarter of the fifteenth century the Low Countries
displayed a cultural scene of some interest. There was the flashy and
rather superficial learning of the Bruges court of the Burgundian dukes and
their Habsburg successors; there was the intellectual movement drawing
its inspiration from the pious ideals of the Devotio Moderna ; and finally
there was the traditional scholasticism of the Louvain theologians. Intel-
lectual activity at the Bruges court found its favourite expression not in
the imitation of classical models, but in the superficial rendering in French

I I I IO-J

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

of classical themes conditioned by an obvious taste for mythology. Some
translating from the classics was not unknown, but it was not the turning
of Greek authors into Latin but rather of Latin texts into French. Books
printed at Bruges during the last quarter of the fifteenth century provide
a reliable picture of the prevailing taste, a taste which appears at its most
typical in the tortuous and meretricious writings of Jean Lemaire de
Beiges ( c . 1473-1516?). On the other hand, outside the court, intellectual
vigour was found in the clergy, not the laity ; it came, however, not from
scholastic learning, but from the sober piety of the Devotio Moderna.
What the two branches of the Devotio Moderna (the congregation of
Austin Canons at Windesheim and the Brethren of the Common Life) had
ultimately in view, was to do for religion what humanism was doing for
learning. Deeply influenced by mystics like St Bernard and the writers of
the school of St Victor, they opposed to the dry formalism of medieval
scholasticism that intellectual humility which found its best expression in
the pages of the Imitatio Christi.

As educators, the Brethren proved outstanding and successful. In fact
their schools, which by the end of the fifteenth century had spread as far
as Alsace and south Germany, were responsible among other things for
the education of such leading figures in the intellectual history of northern
Europe as Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus. The great success of the
Brethren’s schools was due to many things: to their efficient organisation
and sensible syllabus, to their introduction of religious instruction, to
their boarding arrangements, and above all to their employment of up-to-
date methods of teaching. The greatest of their schoolmasters, Alexander
van Heek, or Hegius (1433-98), who taught at Deventer from 1483, was
a great believer in the cultural value of Greek and in the desirability of
modelling one’s style on the best classical and humanist examples. The
Brethren’s cultural activity did not stop at education: they were also very
active in the writing of devotional literature and in the transcription of
manuscripts. Once printing started they were quick to see its significance
and to establish printing presses, which turned out not treatises on
scholastic theology, but devotional works, grammars, and classical and
humanist writings suitable for school teaching. The interest in humanist
works taken by the Brethren of the Common Life is certainly not sur-
prising, in view of the many cultural and trade exchanges between the
Low Countries and Italy. Throughout the fifteenth century students from
Flanders and the Netherlands had gone to study at the principal Italian uni-
versities, including Rudolf Husmann surnamed Agricola (1444-85), whose
humanist learning aroused admiration in Germany and Italy as well as at
home. It was to the Italians that Agricola owed his conception of elo-
quentia, and it was in Italy that he formed his excellent Latin style and
mastered Greek. In the Inventio Dialectica Agricola showed an approach
to rhetoric which harmonised the new and the traditional views, while in

112

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

the De Formando Studio he put forward a conception of education full of
refreshing common sense. Despite his humanist leanings, Agricola never
wavered in his respect for Aristotle and his Thomist interpreters. Never-
theless, up to his death he remained above all a very gifted rhetorician,
fascinated by the formal side of humanism. Now an assimilation of the
new values as shown by Agricola was certainly exceptional in a man with
his background. His countryman John Wessel of Gansfort (c. 1420-89),
for instance, never faltered in his allegiance to William of Occam, the
Venerabilis Inceptor of the Nominalists. It is true that he was indebted
for his Greek and his Hebrew, both of which he also taught, to his Italian
masters. Yet this puritan so much admired by Luther was utterly un-
impressed by the Florence of Marsilio Ficino and the Rome of Pomponio
Leto, and remained to the end a theologian strongly imbued with mysti-
cism, enthusiastic for reform and the advancement of biblical knowledge.

On the whole, the followers of the Devotio Moderna had been hostile
to traditional scholasticism. A stronghold of scholasticism in the Low
Countries was provided by the University of Louvain, which was domi-
nated by Realist theologians and was eventually to become a powerful
fortress of the Counter-Reformation. The teaching in Louvain of the
humanist rhetorician Stefano Surigone about 1480 left no appreciable
signs and was quickly forgotten. Not forgotten, however, were the
activities of Adrian Florents of Utrecht, who ended his life in 1523 as
Pope Adrian VI. The brilliant academic career of Adrian of Utrecht
shows also how the old syllogistic methods were still being pursued at
Louvain during the second decade of the sixteenth century. Yet even in
so conservative a university, humanist ideas were not by-passed altogether.
Greek printing started there about 1515, and it was thanks to the imagi-
native generosity of Jerome Busleiden that a trilingual college was estab-
lished at Louvain about 1517, with the result that Greek and Hebrew
began to be taught regularly there from 1518. As might have been ex-
pected, such innovations were not unopposed. Jacobus Latomus (1475-
1544), the formidable controversialist who attacked both Luther and
Erasmus, and Martin van Dorp or Dorpius (1485-1525), now chiefly
remembered for his hostility to Erasmus, took up a definite position
against Greek. Dorpius is also known to have replied in some of his
Louvain lectures to the attacks which Lorenzo Valla had delivered against
the schoolmen a couple of generations earlier; he held that the Greek
text of the gospels was utterly useless for the study of the Bible, an
attitude which was but typical in view of his suspicions of the new trends
in biblical scholarship.

Among classical scholars who hailed from the Low Countries, we must
also include Christopher de Longueil, better known as Longolius (1488—
1522). A native of Malines, he had been brought up in France, but his
scholarly activity took place in Italy, where his ability and uncompromising

”3

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

devotion to Ciceronianism soon placed him among the best followers of
that fashion. As a scholar Longolius aroused both envy and admiration
among the Italians ; even Erasmus, for all his hostility to Ciceronianism,
appreciated his many good qualities.

In due course Erasmus (1466-1536) became the most significant figure
in the intellectual life of Europe of his time. Yet this truly international
scholar never shook off completely all traces of the learning in which he
had been brought up. He remained to the end a typical child of the
Devotio Moderna in his desire to serve God by advancing knowledge and
in his passion for sacred letters, which he intended to free from the pre-
vailing barbaries. It is true that he soon gave up many of the views held
by Alexander Hegius and that he was indifferent to mysticism; all the
same his humanist evangelism, with its strong emphasis on a return to the
Bible, as well as his hostility to Lutheran determinism, certainly place
him within the tradition of the Devotio Moderna, just as his distaste for
scholasticism also links him with this tradition.

Erasmus’s Greek learning and contacts with Italian humanism proved
invaluable for his biblical and patristic studies. His critical approach to
the text of the gospels — culminating in his edition of the Greek New
Testament, which first appeared in 1516— was clearly conditioned by
Valla’s work in this field. (Erasmus was responsible for the first edition
of Valla’s In Novum Testamentum Annotationes, printed at Paris in 1505.)
Erasmus’s textual criticism followed the lines recommended by Politian
and his pupils for the editing of classical writings. The anticiceronian
revolt initiated by Politian was also taken up by Erasmus; his opinions on
the subject were given full expression in 1528 in his Ciceronianus, where
ridicule is mercilessly poured upon Cicero’s devotees. Altogether, Eras-
mus’s literary output was prodigious. His numerous writings include
biblical exegesis, versions from the Greek, doctrinal treatises, apologies,
and editions of the classics and the Fathers. For all its greatness, his
learning had some limitations. As a hellenist he paid no attention to
Homer, Sophocles, or Aeschylus, probably because they were too difficult
for him rather than because Euripides, Libanius, and Lucian were really
more congenial to his tastes. In Latin he was not particularly impressed
by Virgil and his own poems were undistinguished. But then Erasmus’s
gifts did not include a real feeling for poetry or literary beauty. His
approach to the classics was in some ways still medieval, particularly in
his regarding them ultimately as repositories of ethical principles, moral
wisdom, and fine phrases, rather than expressions of a great civilisation.
As a thinker he was admittedly neither profound nor very original, and
abstract speculation was clearly distasteful to him. Yet he could surmount
such deficiencies thanks to his extremely sharp eye for the significant, his
massive erudition, and his gift for persuasive writing, which made his
views often appear well-nigh irresistible. His influence upon his contem-

114

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

poraries was immense, chiefly because of his admirable common sense,
and yet his name is not linked to any great movement or event. Erasmus
was well aware of his powers, but instead of becoming a papalist like
Aleandro or a reformer like Melanchthon, he chose to remain a private
scholar, mostly engaged in the editing of ancient writings. A survey of
Erasmus’s labours will make it appear quite clear that his best-known works
are not really those which form his real and lasting contribution to learning.
His real achievement is not to be found in his brilliantly entertaining Latin
dialogues, nor in the Praise of Folly, nor in his handbooks on education
and practical piety, but in his work as an editor of texts. It was definitely
with him that the critical study of the early Fathers had its beginnings;
he carried Valla’s New Testament criticism a stage farther, showing
eventually that the Vulgate was far from infallible. An interesting aspect
of all this editorial and critical activity lies in the results which Erasmus
expected it to yield. Once accurate texts of the Fathers and above all of
the New Testament were available, religious contention was in his opinion
bound to come to an end, since with the relevant texts freed from am-
biguities and interpolations, no misunderstanding as to their real meaning
would be possible. It was perhaps in the Adagia, first published in 1500,
that admirable collection of classical quotations fully commented, that
Erasmus’s gifts and learning appear at their best, just as it is above all
from the pages of this book that there emerges the real Erasmus, displaying
his tolerance, his wit, his amazing learning, and the astonishing range of
his intellectual powers.

Italian influence on late fifteenth-century German culture was inevitable.
Some of the most significant figures in the intellectual history of the
century, such as Nicholas of Cusa (c. 1401-64), Gregor Heimburg (1410-
72), and Albrecht von Eyb (1420-75) had studied in Italy, where they had
been influenced by humanism. Such an influence upon German scholars
had been steadily increasing as the fifteenth century went on, to such an
extent that by the end of it some of them had assumed some of the
methods and mannerisms of their colleagues south of the Alps. Printing
was a German invention: hence it is not surprising that this art should
have spread more rapidly at first in German lands than anywhere else.
The number of books published in the imperial territories and Switzerland
between the days of Gutenberg and 1520 is most impressive and, as might
be expected, most of these volumes treated subjects linked with traditional
studies, religious practice, or professional use ; but side by side with them
there appeared also a substantial number of publications dedicated to
classical and humanist literature. Indeed, by the beginning of the sixteenth
century more than one publisher had started to cater especially, or at any
rate mostly, for a clientele with humanist sympathies: the leading example
being at Basle, where first the Amerbachs and then Froben, Erasmus’s own

115

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

publisher, established traditions similar to those which Aldus had in-
augurated in Venice. It was also during the last quarter of the fifteenth
century that school teaching began to be affected by the new values.
Schools like the one established by Rudolf von Langen at Munster, or
the one at Schlettstadt headed by Ludwig Dringenberg, conformed to
the emphasis on the ancient classics traditional in the teaching of the
Brethren of the Common Life, yet displaying also a more liberal concep-
tion of education than had hitherto been the case. This favourable attitude
towards the humanities was also to be found at the universities. Even the
oldest German universities had only been founded during the second half
of the fourteenth century; but once they had been started their develop-
ment was so swift, that by the beginning of the fifteenth century Vienna,
Erfurt, and Heidelberg were already flourishing seats of learning. The rise
of humanism at the German universities met with little opposition at
first, partly because no dangers were seen in it, but also because academic
attention was too much absorbed by the strife between Realists and Nomi-
nalists. So deep was this feud that at some universities, at Heidelberg
and Ingolstadt for instance, it led to the arts faculties splitting into two,
each section with deans, teachers, and halls of its own, one following the
via antiqua, that is to say Realism, and the other the via moderna, that is
to say Nominalism. Far from opposing them, the theologians actually
welcomed the humanists at first because of the assistance which their
studies could give to divinity. The real difficulties facing the introduction
of humanist teaching were administrative, as there was no financial provis-
ion for it and the existing curricula were not elastic enough to admit new
subjects. These difficulties nwctc wot insuperable; lectures on humanist
topics were gradually fitted in without unduly upsetting the curricula,
while the funds required to pay the teachers were somehow raised. Thus
Peter Luder was able to lecture on the Latin poets at several German
universities until his death about 1474, and his is not the only example.
Among those who introduced humanist studies into the German uni-
versities there were also some of those Italian wandering scholars who
were so frequently to be found throughout Europe during the fifteenth
century. One of them, the Florentine rhetorician Jacopo Publicio, taught
with some success at Erfurt, Leipzig, Cracow, and Basle in 1467-70.
Another, the Milanese Stefano Surigone, pursued similar activities at
Strassburg and Cologne, while Cinzio da Borgo Sansepolcro was active
in Vienna in 1487. Cinzio’s role in Vienna was, however, dimmed by that
of Gerolamo Balbo, who proved to be undoubtedly the most influential
Italian teacher in the imperial territories. The greatest contributions to
the new conceptions of learning came even in the early stages from the
Germans themselves, and particularly from those who had studied in
Italy. Among other things, these German scholars were instrumental in
creating an interest in Italian humanist writings, those by Pico della

1 16

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

Mirandola, Ficino, Valla, and Battista Mantovano being clearly the most
popular. Another scholar from abroad whose writings proved both
popular and influential was Lefevre d’fitaples, thanks chiefly to Beatus
Rhenanus, who had been his pupil in Paris, and also to Peutinger,
Reuchlin, and the Amerbachs, all of whom were in touch with him.
Lefevre’s many German admirers actually assumed the name of ‘ Fabris-
tae\ and as such claimed, in opposition to the Occamists, that they and
they alone were the true representatives of Aristotelianism.

In such a world as that of German learning amateurs were also able to
exert a vigorous influence. A scholar like Peter Schott, canon of Strass-
burg and the author of Latin poems and a treatise on prosody (1458-90),
impressed his own town with his example: Hermann Schedel (1410-85)
and Hartmann Schedel (1440-15 14) left a mark on the intellectual life
of Niirnberg. But by far the most influential of these amateurs was
Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), abbot of Sponheim and later of
Wurzburg. The literary output of Trithemius, which ranged from theology
to practical piety and from bibliography to history, is impressive, and his
De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis published in 1494 is still useful to scholars
today. His greatest achievement is, however, to be sought in the powerful
influence exerted by him upon those scholars from all parts of the Empire
who either corresponded or came into contact with him. Because of the
geographical and political structure of German-speaking Europe, it was
inevitable that humanism should flourish simultaneously in various towns
of those regions. A result of this lack of centralisation was the presence
of circles of scholars, for instance those who gathered around Pirckheimer
at Niirnberg or Wimpfeling at Strassburg during the early sixteenth
century. Another result was the foundation of literary societies or aca-
demies, some of which owed their existence to the enthusiasm of Conrad
Celtis (1459-1508). One of these societies founded by Celtis was the
Sodalitas Literaria Rhenana. Another, the Sodalitas Danubiana, was
established by him after he had settled in Vienna in 1497 at the invitation
of the Emperor Maximilian I, and it continued to flourish under Celtis’s
successor, Johannes Cuspinianus (1473-1529), the antiquary who initiated
the study of Roman chronology. And while in Vienna Celtis was also
able to induce Maximilian I to found a Collegium Poetarum et Mathe-
maticorum, which was duly placed under Celtis’s headship and drew its
main strength from his enthusiasm. All these academies were chiefly
mutual admiration societies with a bent for antiquarian pursuits and Latin
versification. This latter was certainly a most popular activity among
German humanists. Albrecht von Eyb and Peter Luder had above all
been rhetoricians with a taste for poetics, and so had Wimpfeling, though
he also had other interests. Celtis thought primarily of himself as a
poet, and his poems, though commonplace enough, secured for him the
laurel crown and the title of laureate from the emperor Frederick III at

117

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Niimberg in 1487. The poems by Cel tis and Eobanus Hess (1488-1540), who
held a chair of rhetoric at Erfurt from 1517 to 1526, show how very
mediocre was even the best that German humanism could offer in this
respect. Equally mediocre were the Latin poems of Sebastian Brant,
whose most successful work, the Narrenschiff, was written in German.

Rhetoric and versification may have been the most showy, but were
certainly not the most important activity of German humanism. Those
scholars who chose to edit ancient texts gave a more solid contribution
to learning, even though many of their emendations were purely fanciful.
It is to the astronomer Johann Muller, better known as Regiomontanus
(1436-76), that we owe the editio princeps of Manilius published in 1472.
Celtis edited two of Seneca’s tragedies in 1489 and Tacitus’ Germania in
1500, Cuspinianus was responsible for editions of Floras and Avianus,
while Virgil found an editor in Sebastian Brant. But the most important
German editor of classical texts was Beatus Rhenanus (1485-1547), whose
work includes the first edition of the Roman history by Velleius Pater-
culus, a work which he himself had discovered in 1515 at Murbach.
Another important activity of German humanism was the outcome of the
belief, fostered by the new conceptions of learning, that the German past
had a greatness of its own by no means inferior to that of ancient Rome.
This romantic notion was responsible for Celtis’s publication of Tacitus’
Germania, for the editing of medieval texts reflecting Germany’s past
glory and also for research into its early history and antiquities. In
medieval studies Celtis proved a pioneer with his editions of Hrotswitha’s
plays in 1500 and of the Ligurinus by Gunther the Cistercian seven years
later. Stimulated by the example of Biondo Flavio’s Italia Illustrata,
Celtis planned also a Germania Illustrata, which was to show Germany in
its true light. Only part of it, the Germania Generalis, was completed and
published in 1500. In the following year appeared the Germania of Jacob
Wimpfeling (1450-1528), in which it was claimed with a wealth of his-
torical documentation that Alsace was German : a thesis which naturally
caused much controversy. Wimpfeling’s Epitome Rerum Germanicarum,
published in 1505, gave a history of Germany from the earliest times;
this was followed in 1518 by Franciscus Irenicus’s survey of German
medieval history. The best work of the kind was, however, the Annales
Boaiorum by Johann Turmair sumamed Aventinus (1477-1534), which
constituted also a definite landmark in the development of German
historiography. Interest in the German past was also responsible for the
commentary on Tacitus’ Germania by Beatus Rhenanus, published in
Basle in 1520: its fullest glorification is, however, to be found in the
writings of Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) and particularly in his Latin
dialogue Arminius, written in 1520, but only published in 1528, where
Arminius is set up as a national hero and a symbol of German resistance
to Rome throughout the ages.

1 18

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries some German
antiquaries developed a taste for epigraphy, which proved of some value.
Classical and medieval inscriptions had been collected by Hartmann
Schedel, whose large corpus is now at Munich ; Thomas Wolf (1457-1509)
had also indulged in similar pursuits. It was Konrad Peutinger of Augs-
burg (1465-1547) who proved the most distinguished epigraphist and
antiquary of his time in Germany. His collections included coins, medals,
sculptures, manuscripts, and, of course, the famous Tabula Peutingeriana,
which he had obtained from Celtis. He was nevertheless more than a mere
collector of antiques; besides editing some classical and early medieval
authors he was also responsible for the publication in 1505 of an important
series of Roman inscriptions found in the Augsburg Diocese. Like many
of his contemporaries, Peutinger knew Greek, was interested in Hebrew,
and extended his investigations to medieval remains. Now the value of
Greek had already been realised in German-speaking Europe during the
fifteenth century. It must, however, be noted that here Greek studies were
mostly directed towards securing a better knowledge of the Bible and the
Fathers; this was an obvious outcome of the close connection between
early German humanism and scholasticism. During the last quarter of
the fifteenth century some teaching of Greek had been given at Heidelberg
by Agricola, and at Basle by the Byzantine refugee Andronicus Canto-
blacas, who numbered Reuchlin among his pupils. At a later stage Greek
was also taught at Basle by Johann Kuno (d. 1513) and another Greek
scholar in the same town was Johann Oecolampadius (1482-1531), whose
assistance proved invaluable to Erasmus in editing the Greek New Testa-
ment. Meanwhile at Cologne and Leipzig some considerable advance in
Greek studies was achieved thanks to the teaching of an Englishman,
Richard Croke ( c . 1489-1558), a former pupil of Aleandro, who continued
lecturing until 1517, when he returned home. A successor for him was,
however, found in 1518 in the person of Peter Mosellanus, thanks to
whom the traditions initiated by Croke were continued in Leipzig. During
this same year Melanchthon (1497-1560), in his inaugural lecture at
Wittenberg, stressed the importance of classical languages and particularly
Greek, and published a handbook on Greek grammar. Yet although by
1520 Greek had been for some time a recognised university subject, it had
not been easy for Germans to secure a knowledge of the language before
the sixteenth century except abroad. Nicholas of Cusa, Regiomontanus,
Peter Schott, Johann Kuno, and Beatus Rhenanus had learnt the language
outside Germany, and the last of them had started Greek in Paris under
George Hermonymos, while Reuchlin, besides receiving instruction from
Cantoblacas and Hermonymos, had also spent some time in Italy in the
lecture-rooms of Argyropoulos and Chalcocondylas. The version of a
Latin homily of Proclus made by Reuchlin in 1488 indicates his proficiency
in Greek at an early stage; his later erudition in this field was particularly

119

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

shown in the tract in which he defended the traditional pronunciation of
Greek in opposition to Erasmus’s views on the subject. A competent
grasp of Greek is also evident in the translation of two sermons by
St Gregory of Nazianzus by Beatus Rhenanus, whose activity also in-
cluded the occasional writing of letters in a Greek much superior to that
of those pitiful epigrams in which Celtis had proudly meant to advertise
his Greek scholarship.

Theological studies were responsible for a lively interest in Hebrew.
Celtis, Trithemius, and Peutinger had certainly been interested in this
language. It was, however, Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522) who became the
first German humanist to rank also as a competent Hebrew scholar.
Hebrew was Reuchlin’s great passion. He had started to study it
about 1493 with the assistance of Jacob Jehiel Loans. What attracted
Reuchlin towards Hebrew studies was his desire to study the Old Testa-
ment in the original, and to master cabbalistic literature as Pico della
Mirandola had done before him. The De Arte Cabbalistica , published in
1517, was one of the results of these studies; others were his works on
Hebrew grammar issued in 1506 and 1518. By then Hebrew had also
secured other non- Jewish devotees in German lands, including Conrad
Pellican (1478-1556), who taught himself the language, and Oecolam-
padius, Erasmus’s friend and collaborator at Basle. The name of Reuchlin
is for ever linked with the controversy about Hebrew books, which even-
tually became a struggle between scholasticism and the humanities. His
fight with the Cologne Dominicans, who had secured a ban on Hebrew
literature in 1509, led to a permanent split between humanism and scholas-
ticism in Germany. Not only the reactionary Thomism of Cologne, but
also the other traditional manifestations of theological thought, were now
violently attacked by the supporters of Reuchlin, to whom this ban was a
threat against the very values of humanism. In the Epistolae Obscurorum
Virorum, that striking expression of the feelings of the humanist side,
ridicule is pitilessly poured upon the methods of the schoolmen. Ulti-
mately these fictitious letters aim at its methods in order to strike at the
very core of scholastic learning. The condemnation of Hebrew books had
been a spark, which had precipitated a crisis which was in any case bound
to occur. By the second decade of the sixteenth century German secular
culture had reached such a stage in its development that no compromise
with the traditional learning of the schoolmen was any longer possible.
The tendency now was no longer to bring the humanities into the theo-
logical orbit but rather the opposite, which partly explains also why so
many German humanists sided with the Reformation.

Whereas in Germany humanism was already fully developed by the end
of the fifteenth century, the Scandinavian countries were still unaffected
by it even as late as 1520. This is not surprising in Norway and Iceland,

120

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

but it is so in Sweden and Denmark, when we consider their many
exchanges with the rest of Europe. In Sweden no university had existed
until 1477, when a bull of Sixtus IV sanctioned the foundation of one at
Uppsala. Teaching in the arts and theology started there at once, but it
was conducted on strictly medieval lines. Books issued by the early
Swedish press between its inception in 1478 and 1520 confirm the con-
servative nature of the country’s learning. The situation in Denmark was
the same. The university established at Copenhagen in 1478 was hardly
more progressive than Uppsala, while the evidence of books printed in
Denmark between 1482 and 1520 shows no wider range of intellectual
interests than in Sweden. It was only with the Reformation that the New
Learning penetrated into Scandinavia.

The swift development of Spain during the half-century 1470-1520 was
also reflected in the intellectual sphere. A new interest in the humanities
was already evident there shortly after 1470, being mainly the outcome of
humanist influence from Italy. All the great early Spanish humanists,
Nebrija and Heman Nunez among them, had attended Italian universities,
and it was chiefly through their enthusiasm that the new values were
established in the Castilian kingdom. Scarcely less valuable than the
efforts of these scholars was the role played by those Italian men of learning
who had come over to teach during the last quarter of the fifteenth century.
The first of them, Pomponio Mantovano, was already lecturing on the
Latin poets at Salamanca in 1473; a more important contribution to
Spanish learning was given by two former pupils of Pomponio Leto:
Lucio Marineo Siculo (c. 1446-c. 1533), who reached Spain in 1484, and
Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (1459-1526), who arrived there some three
years later. Both Marineo and Martire proved invaluable as teachers of
the humanities. Yet their greatest achievement was in the field of history,
for Marineo, whose interest in Spanish antiquities is already evident in his
De Hispaniae Laudibus issued in 1495, wrote also the history of his royal
master in accordance with the principles of humanist historiography; it
was left to Pietro Martire to become with his Decades de Orbe Novo the
historian of the New World and of Columbus’s achievement.

The humanist interest so evident at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella
and at Salamanca was bound to influence school teaching. This influence
was particularly obvious in the school attached to the court, where Italian
scholars were especially appointed as instructors in order to improve the
scholarship of members of the royal household. Antonio Geraldini, for
instance, was acting as tutor to one of the princesses until his death in
1488, and both Marineo and Martire were among those who taught at
this court school. The post of secretary for Latin letters, a position which
had been held under Henry IV (1454-74) by Alonso Hernandez de
Palencia (c. 1423-92), a scholar trained in Italy, where he had assimilated

121

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

some of the ideals of humanism, was occupied for some time under
Ferdinand and Isabella by Pietro Martire, this being yet another sign of
the official appreciation of good Latin. The humanist teaching so evident
at court extended also to Salamanca, then the most important university
in the whole kingdom. In 1484, that is to say after Pomponio Mantovano
had been lecturing on the Latin poets at Salamanca for eleven years,
similar courses were given there by Marineo Siculo and from 1488 by
Pietro Martire. This humanist lecturing was by no means an Italian
monopoly. One of the chairs of grammar at the university was occupied
by Antonio de Nebrija, the foremost Spanish humanist of the age, and
towards the very end of the fifteenth century a former pupil of Politian
in Florence, the Portuguese Arias Barbosa, gave public instruction in
Greek. What counted most at Salamanca was Thomist theology, no room
being allowed there for rival doctrines, such as Scotism and Occamism.
It was as a reaction against the old-fashioned conservatism of Salamanca
that Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo and
primate of Spain (1437-1517), founded a university at Alcald de Henares
in 1508. His intention in doing this was not to found a home for the New
Learning in Spain, but to establish an institution dedicated to ecclesias-
tical teaching and the philosophy of Duns Scotus. The enlightened out-
look of the founder led nevertheless to its soon becoming the headquarters
of Christian humanism in the country. The establishment of Scotist and
Nominalist teaching at Alcala was no doubt a striking innovation. But
besides this, Jimenez had also provided for the study of Greek and Oriental
languages to the advancement of biblical knowledge: and when it is added
that the greatest early sixteenth-century Spanish humanists were invited
to Alcala by the founder, one can hardly doubt the ultimate nature of his
intentions.

Further proof of the enthusiasm for humanism in the Castilian king-
dom is given by the nature of some of the books printed there up to 1520.
These included several texts of the Latin classics, starting with the Sallust
of 1475, and also some humanist writings from Italy. Equally significant
is the number of grammatical treatises published during the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, which show the growing interest in this field
since the introduction of printing in the peninsula. The main innovations
in grammatical teaching came from Antonio de Nebrija who, having
assimilated Valla’s precepts in Italy, started a vigorous campaign against
barbarous Latin after his return home in 1473. Nebrija’s Introductiones
Latinae quickly supplanted the old-fashioned Latin grammars in schools
and universities. Nor was his example an isolated one, for Andreas
Gutierrez issued his Grammatical 1485 and Juan de Pastrana his popular
Compendium Grammaticae in 1492. About this same year came out
Nebrija’s Latin-Castilian dictionary as well as one by Alonso Hernandez
dePalencia, these being followed in 1499 by the Vocabularium Ecclesias-

122

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

ticum of Maese Rodrigo de SantaeUa (1444-1509), which aimed to explain
the terminology of the Church to those who had no Latin.

The position of Elio Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522) in the early history
of Spanish humanism is very significant. Ten years in Italy gave him
mastery of the humanities, and a determination to introduce Italian
cultural values at home. He achieved this by teaching and personal
influence and by his writings. As a scholar his interests were many-sided.
Besides grammatical and lexicographical work, he edited and commented
on several Latin classics and was the first Renaissance scholar to set
down definite rules for the pronunciation of Greek. He also left impor-
tant work on Spanish antiquities and the ancient geographers and was
interested in Hebrew. His historical work, the Decades, where he gave
the events of their reign up to 1485 in the manner prescribed by humanist
tradition, justified his appointment as historiographer royal by Ferdinand
and Isabella. But his great passion was the study of the Bible, where he
struck an original note by holding that the real Vulgate could only be
established by a critical examination of the most ancient manuscripts
and through submitting several of its passages to a searching critical
examination. This attitude towards Holy Writ was obviously too revolu-
tionary for the Salamanca divines; after teaching for many years at
that university, Nebrija was eventually forced to give up his chair about
1512. He was promptly rescued by Jimenez, who had him appointed
to a chair at Alcala where, besides lecturing on the classics, he also
assisted in the preparation of the Greek sections of the Complutensian
Bible.

Greek studies had been started at Salamanca during the last years of
the fifteenth century by Arias Barbosa, whose best pupil, Hernan Nunez
(1471-1522), was to become the most prominent hellenist of his time in
Spain. Other Greek scholars in the country during this period were
Fernando de Cordoba (1425-86), whose main preoccupation was the
reconciling of Aristotle’s doctrines with those of Plato, and Maese Rodrigo
de Santaella, who translated a letter by St Basil and another one by the
Emperor Julian into Latin and Spanish. These versions were printed at
the end of the first edition of his Vocabularium and are probably the first
versions from the Greek made by a Spaniard during the Renaissance.
One thing that appears from these early Greek studies in Spain is that
Greek was valued not so much on account of its classical literature, as
because it was the tongue of the New Testament and many of the early
Fathers. This was actually also the view of Jimenez who held that no one
could be a good theologian without a knowledge of Greek, which ex-
plains of course his anxiety to make Alcala the leading centre of Hellenic
studies in the country. Thus the Cretan Demetrius Doukas held a chair
of Greek at Alcala from 1512 to 1518, the same chair being filled in 1 5 1 9 by
Hernan Nunez. The activities of Doukas at Alcala included the publication

123

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

in 1514 of two Greek works, Lascaris’s grammar and the poem on Hero
and Leander by Musaeus, for the use of students. These two books were
printed in one volume at Alcala in 1514. This example was followed later
by Heman Nunez, who in the year of his appointment issued there two
short Greek texts with an interlinear Latin version. About this same
period Jimenez’s secretary, Juan de Vergara, was busy turning three of
Aristotle’s treatises into Latin. The main achievement of the Alcald
hellenists was, however, their collaborative edition of the Greek New
Testament, an edition which was already in print in 1514, that is to say
some two years before Erasmus’s text was published at Basle.

The enthusiasm for biblical scholarship at Alcala was also responsible
for the study of the other languages of the Bible : Hebrew and Aramaic.
A converted Jew, Alfonso de Zamora, was already teaching Hebrew
there in 1512, and both he and his fellow convert, Pablo de Coronel, were
also engaged on the Hebrew and Aramaic sections of the Complutensian
Polyglot Bible, which derived its name of Complutensian from the
Latin name for Alcala (Complutum). It was a splendid achievement in-
spired by Jimenez’s enthusiasm and carried out at his expense. As early
as 1502 Jimenez had started to take steps to publish the whole Bible in
its original languages as well as in the Vulgate text. Soon after founding
the university at Alcala, he had gathered there a group of eminent scholars
entrusted with the editorial side of the venture, and even a printer for
producing the actual volumes. The first part, which consisted of the New
Testament, was already printed in 1514, though not issued. This was
followed one year later by a lexicon of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic,
after which there came in 1517 four more volumes with the Old Testament.
Jimenez was, however, fated never to see the publication of this monu-
mental work, since he died in 1 5 1 7 and it was only in 1 520 that Pope Leo X
finally licensed it for publication.

Without doubt the Complutensian Bible was the greatest achievement
of early Spanish humanism. Another and hardly less ambitious project
of Jimenez, the publication of all the works of Aristotle both in the original
and in a new Latin translation which was to supersede all the earlier ones,
was interrupted by the Cardinal’s death, when only three works had been
turned into Latin by Juan de Vergara. Equally unsuccessful were the
efforts made by Jimenez shortly before his death to attract Erasmus to
Spain. Instead Erasmus, whose influence had proved so strong in that
country, was to become in 1520 the target of an attack by Diego Lopez
Zuniga, whose work on the Complutensian Bible had not prevented him
from developing a fierce hostility towards Erasmus (in his Jacobi Lopidis
Stunicae Annotationes contra Erasmum, Alcala, 1520) and Lefevre d’litaples
(in Annotationes Jacobi Lopidis Stunicae contra Jacobum Fabrum Stapu-
lensem, Alcala, 1519), hostility being aroused above all by a fear of
their views.

124

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

LEARNING AND EDUCATION, I47O-I52O

The Christian humanism which had aroused so much interest and con-
troversy in the Castilian kingdom found much less response in Aragon.
Despite its close links with south Italy, and with Rome under the two
Borgia popes, Calixtus III (1455-8) and Alexander VI (1492-1503),
education in Aragon had remained thoroughly medieval throughout the
fifteenth century. The activities of Jeronimo Amiguet, whose Synonima
appeared in 1502 and whose Isagogicon sive introductory ad artem
grammaticam came out in Barcelona in 1514, show, however, how the
approach to Latin grammar, which had been fashionable in Castile for
some time, had by then also reached Aragon. What were not to be found,
on the other hand, were scholars like Nebrija or Heman Nunez. The first
exponent of the New Learning in Aragon, Cardinal Joan Margarit i Pau,
bishop of Gerona (d. 1484), was primarily a diplomat who wrote also on
politics and moral philophy. Humanist influence is, however, undeniably
present in his Paralipomena Hispaniae, where the author is obviously
conforming with the humanist conception of historiography inaugurated
by Leonardo Bruni in the early fifteenth century, as well as showing an
attitude to Spanish antiquities which is not too dissimilar from that held
by Nebrija. The cardinal’s attraction for humanist learning was shared
by his nephew, Geroni i Pau, who besides securing a sound knowledge
of Greek and preparing a Latin treatise on the rivers and mountains of
Spain, obviously inspired by Boccaccio’s De Montibus, became also the
librarian of Pope Alexander VI. The foundation of a university at Valencia
in 1500 was meant to stimulate humanist studies, as is evident from the
terms of its foundation bull, which made provision for the teaching of
Greek and Latin letters as well as for the traditional subjects. Yet even
this did not succeed in arousing that kind of popularity for the humanities
which was so evident at Salamanca and above all at Alcala.

Not so dissimilar from the cultural situation in Aragon was that pre-
vailing in Portugal, where some links with Florentine humanism had
already been established during the last decades of the fifteenth century.
The Florentine rhetorician Jacopo Publicio had taught in Portugal during
his wanderings through Europe between 1465 and 1480, and later Politian
had been in correspondence with King John II of Portugal (1481-95),
while his pupils had included Arias Barbosa, who became the first teacher
of Greek at Salamanca. A former teacher of rhetoric at the University
of Pavia, Cataldo Parisio, taught at Coimbra until 1495, when King John II
called him to his court. The Latin oration addressed to this king by
Ludovico Texeira, printed at Coimbra in 1502, is already quite humanist
in outlook. So is the Prosodia Grammaticae by Estevan Cavaillero printed
at Lisbon in 1505, four years after an edition of the Latin grammar by
Pastrana had appeared in that town. All the same, it would be an exaggera-
tion to say that humanism had become an essential part of Portuguese
culture by the year 1520. Until then both learning and education had

II 125 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

strayed very little from the old standards, and it was only during the
subsequent decade that Portugal was able to provide in Damiao de Gois
a scholar of European reputation.

An account of western European culture between 1470 and 1520 shows
how humanism gradually succeeded in becoming an integral part of it
during this half century. Outside Italy, humanism was admitted into the
structure of scholasticism, thus becoming a Christian humanism, and still
keeping many traditional features of the medieval schools in a Renaissance
attire. Whereas in Italy humanism had remained fundamentally secular,
it could not be said that this was so in the other countries of western
Europe on the eve of the Reformation. What existed north of the Alps
was a Christian conception and adaptation of humane studies, whose
ultimate goals were the advancement of theological and biblical know-
ledge. Scholars like Bude in France or Linacre in England were certainly
not typical of their environment. It was left rather to Colet, Lefevre
d’Etaples, Beatus Rhenanus, and Nebrija to show the approach to
humanism in their countries at its most typical. If there was in fact one
person who may be said to have personified the various trends and ideals
of non-Italian humanism, it was Erasmus. With him northern humanism
reached its peak, just as during the period which was justly called his
Age western European humanism succeeded in achieving a successful
compromise between the excessively rhetorical preoccupations of the
Italians and the limited horizons of northern piety. The Reformation was
in a way both the culmination and the ruin of humanism. Although
scholars and divines continued even after then to cultivate the humanities,
classical antiquity came less and less to be felt as a living thing and a real
source of inspiration. The end of religious unity in western Europe was
also the end of humanism.

126

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER VI

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

I. IN ITALY

T he period of Italian art with which these pages are concerned is
usually called ‘High Renaissance’. In the course of the fifteenth
century a long chain of ‘Early Renaissance’ artists, mainly of
Florentine descent, had concentrated on a visual as well as theoretical
conquest of nature. Their work formed the basis for a great idealistic
style which began to emerge from about 1490 onwards and was nearing
its end at the time of Raphael’s death in 1 520. It was given fullest ex-
pression during the decade 1500 to 1510, and the names of Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante, Giorgione and Titian, round which
legions of minor stars of considerable brilliance revolve, indicate its
climax. Modem interpreters have excellently analysed the truly classical
qualities of this style which combines, like Greek art of the fifth and fourth
centuries b.c., a spiritual and formal dignity, harmony and equipoise
never before or after equalled in the history of post-classical art. It is
easier to describe this phenomenon than to explain it; nor can an ex-
planation be offered here. But while older writers regarded it mainly and
too simply as a revival of the pagan art of antiquity, more recent studies
have begun to throw light on the complexities of the style by investigating
the intentions of its creators. In following this line of approach, stylistic
appreciations, biographical details and chronology have on the whole
been dispensed with in what follows.

Renaissance architecture is usually described as a ‘rebirth’ of ancient
architecture. This statement finds support in the writings of contemporary
architects themselves, who all professed that they were returning to the
‘ancient manner of building’, after a long period of decline. However, if
one compares a Roman temple with the highest class of centrally-planned
Renaissance church such as Bramante’s design for St Peter’s (1505),
S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi (1508 ff.), perhaps also designed by
him, or Antonio da Sangallo’s Madonna di S. Biagio at Montepulciano
(1518 ff.), it needs real sophistication to discover points of contact between
these buildings. It is true, that during the fifteenth century the Gothic
structural system was superseded by a ‘language’ of forms derived from
classical antiquity, to mention only the five classical orders, Roman types
of vaults and ceilings with coffers, and decorations reminiscent of antique
floral and animal motifs. But these elements had to be adapted to archi-
tectural tasks unknown to antiquity; neither for the planning and ele-
vations of churches nor for communal and private buildings did there

127

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

exist classical models which could be used without considerable trans-
formation. In addition. Renaissance architects freely reinterpreted the
classical grammar. Leon Battista Alberti used classical pilasters to ar-
ticulate the rhythmic alternation of narrow walls and large openings in
S. Andrea at Mantua (1470-93), and this very un-Roman arrangement
became of the greatest importance for the further course of Renaissance
architecture after Bramante had incorporated it in his Vatican buildings
(after 1503).

Furthermore, important motifs of Renaissance architecture are late
antique, medieval and Byzantine. Arches over columns, first introduced
by Brunelleschi in S. Lorenzo, Florence, and later to be found in Biagio
Rossetti’s S. Francesco, Ferrara (1494-1516), Alessio Tramellio’s S. Sisto,
Piacenza (1499-1511), and in many other churches, in courtyards and
loggias, came to them directly or indirectly from Early Christian basilicas
which, in turn, depended on late classical buildings. Centrally-planned
churches with cylindrical exteriors opened in tiers of galleries, a type
common in northern Italy (most notable : Giovanni di Domenico Battagio’s
S. Maria della Croce, Crema, 1490-1500), continue the tradition of
medieval baptisteries (twelfth-century Parma baptistery). Similarly, in
the wake of the same tradition, Lombard Renaissance domes were regu-
larly encased by galleries recalling romanesque architecture. Bramante’s
dome of S. Maria delie Grazie, Milan (1492 ff.), is the principal example.
The palace facade in the early Florentine phase of the Renaissance was
no more than a systematisation of the medieval rusticated front. Although,
beginning with Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai, Florence (1446), new and more
classical types of palaces were slowly evolved, the simple rusticated front
had a long progeny: Benedetto da Maiano’s Palazzo Strozzi (1489-1536),
Giuliano da Sangallo’s Palazzo Gondi (1490-4), both in Florence, the
Palazzo Piccolomini, Siena (1469-1509), Biagio Rossetti’s Palazzo dei
Diamanti, Ferrara (1492-3) and many others are proof of it. In Venice
the traditional medieval palace front was modernised by applying a veneer
of classical forms, as Mauro Conducci’s Palazzi Corner-Spinelli (before
1500) and Manzoni-Angaran (after 1500) exemplify.

The most important type of Renaissance vaulting, the high dome with
or without drum above pendentives, which effect the transition between
the square crossing and the circular shape of the dome, had a Byzantine
pedigree. It was via Venice (St Mark’s, eleventh century) that the type
found entry into Italy. Many of the finest Renaissance domes, culmi-
nating in Michelangelo’s dome of St Peter’s, therefore point back to
Constantinople rather than Rome. A Greek cross plan for churches,
consisting of a dominating dome in the centre, erected above lofty piers,
four short equal arms in the main directions and four satellite domes in
the diagonals, was also of Byzantine derivation. The type was resuscitated
by Mauro Conducci in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, Venice (1497-1504), and,

128

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

transformed into a longitudinal plan by aligning three such Greek cross
units, in Giorgio Spavento’s masterpiece, S. Salvatore, Venice (1506-34).
In his design for St Peter’s Bramante combined the Byzantine Greek cross
plan with massive piers deriving from the sixth-century church of S. Lo-
renzo in Milan. Finally, the ruins of Roman architecture which Renaissance
architects studied were uniform in colour. Following Florentine Gothic
usage (S. Maria Novella, S. Croce), Brunelleschi differentiated in his
buildings between dark structural or articulating features in stone and
light-coloured walls; and an endless number of Renaissance architects
followed him in this respect.

If, genetically speaking. Renaissance architecture combines antique.
Early Christian, medieval and Byzantine elements, and if buildings of the
period under review show little similarity to the architecture of ancient
Rome, Renaissance architects could still rightly claim that they revived the
ancient manner of building. Like ancient architecture, and even more so.
Renaissance architecture is anthropomorphic or, better, anthropometric.
Anthropomorphic, because these architects, thinking in terms of a new
organic conception of nature, claimed that the parts of a building must
be related to each other and to the whole like the members of the human
body; and anthropometric, because it was the metrical relationships of the
human body on which their interest was focused. The Bible taught them
that man was created by divine will in the image of God, and Neoplatonism
that perfect proportions in man reflect something of the harmony of the
universe. Man’s proportions, therefore, should be the norm for man-
made buildings. This was no mere metaphor. The classical column with
its clear division in base, shaft, capital and entablature lent itself to an
interpretation in terms of the human body; and surviving drawings by
Renaissance architects show to what length the anthropometric interpre-
tation of the orders was carried. It is probably correct to say that the
importance attached to the orders in Renaissance architecture was due to
their supreme place in the metrical organisation of buildings rather than
to the wish to use them as structural elements. By making the diameter
of column or pilaster the unit of measurement (‘module’) for all dimen-
sions in a building, and by multiplying and dividing this unit, architects
welded details as well as whole buildings into metrically related organisms.
Herein consists their main achievement, and it is this ‘ humanist * prin-
ciple of metrical integration of all the component parts (like fingers and
toes, feet and hands in the human body) that they found in ancient
architecture but in none of the post-classical styles.

Vitruvius’ work, the only surviving ancient treatise on architecture,
contained what they were looking for. Here they found the most general
principle, first repeated by Alberti and reiterated a hundred times, that
beauty consists in interrelating the size and shape of all the parts so that
nothing could be added or taken away without destroying the harmony of

129

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

the whole. Here they found a detailed discussion of the orders and their
proportions, of the module and the anthropomorphic character of archi-
tecture. Moreover, Vitruvius demonstrated that a well-built man fitted with
extended arms and feet into a square and circle, and they took this as
proof of the mathematical sympathy between the microcosm of man and
the macrocosm of the universe. Following an old tradition, they saw in
the circle, which has neither beginning nor end, a symbol of God; and
concluded that the centralised church with the crowning dome assured
the fullest union of man with God. In addition, the metrical perfection
of centralised churches, in which unity, balance and uniformity are abso-
lute, appeared to these men as the most adequate earthly realisation of
cosmic order and harmony. No wonder then, that after Brunelleschi’s
S. Maria degli Angeli, Florence (1434), centralised churches were erected
in quick succession until there is in the decades before and after 1500
hardly a year without the foundation being laid of one of these great and
beautifully poised buildings. No wonder that Bramante planned the
new St Peter’s, greatest church of Christianity, as a centralised building
surmounted by the mighty hemi-sphere of the dome. While little of this
plan was executed, and while Leonardo’s passionate studies of centralised
churches remained on paper. High Renaissance aspirations found fulfil-
ment in such perfect creations as Giuliano da Sangallo’s S. Maria delle
Carceri, Prato (1485-91), Bramante’s Tempietto, Rome (1502), S. Maria
della Consolazione at Todi (1508), Raphael’s S. Eligio degli Orefici, Rome
(1509) and Zaccagni’s Madonna della Steccata at Parma (1521-39).

Vitruvius’ influence grew rapidly in the course of the fifteenth century,
and by 1 500 familiarity with, and interpretation of, his work had become
every architect’s peremptory duty. This is evidenced by the fact that
Raphael as well as Antonio da Sangallo was engaged on an Italian edition,
and that Fra Giocondo, who shortly before his death in 1515 shared
responsibility in the planning of St Peter’s, published in 15 11 the first
illustrated Latin text ; followed a decade later by Cesariano’s magnificent
edition which reflects Bramante’s and Leonardo’s occupation with the
ancient author. The study of Vitruvius was accompanied by the methodical
copying and measuring of the remains of ancient architecture. Again
a climax was reached in the early years of the sixteenth century with
Baldassare Peruzzi’s vast corpus of drawings and Raphael’s appoint-
ment in 1515 as conservator of Roman antiquities. But these untiring
efforts were not of a primarily antiquarian nature: just as the empirical
method of measuring human figures led Renaissance artists to the ideally
proportioned figure, so the measuring and comparing of ancient archi-
tecture was the acknowledged method of combining the most harmonious
proportions and the most perfect forms. Architects also regarded the
ancient ruins as visible evidence of Roman virtus which had made Rome
the mistress of the world and, in copying them, performed an almost

130

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

magical act of identification through which they hoped to recapture
something of the greatness of bygone days.

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) was the father of the new style in archi-
tecture. While he and his younger contemporaries, above all Michelozzo
and Alberti, began to transform Florence into a Renaissance city, the rest
of Italy remained Gothic. Florentine architects, painters and sculptors
spread the new gospel ; but outside Florence the new manner was assimi-
lated slowly, and in the north and south of Italy its victory was not
complete until the latter part of the fifteenth century. Regional differences
remained strongly marked ; for instance, the love for colourful incrustation
in Venice, and for rich brick and terracotta detail in Lombardy. At the
end of the century Renaissance architecture throughout Italy had many
facets, as a comparison of such diverse buildings as the severe Palazzo
Strozzi, Florence (1489), the refined Cancelleria (1486-98) and Palazzo
Giraud, Rome (1496), which combine rustication and orders, Conducci’s
gay and elegant fagade of the Scuola di San Marco, Venice (1485), and
the finical and over-decorated facade of the Certosa di Pavia (1490’s)
aptly shows. In spite of such divergencies, all these buildings are equally
informed by anthropometry.

When Bramante (1444-1514), coming from Milan, settled in Rome in
1499, this city, barren of native artists and of trifling importance as an
artistic centre, rose to the distinguished position which it maintained for
the next 200 years. The artistic and cultural primacy shifted for good from
Florence to Rome. It is difficult to account for the reasons; they he as
much in the strengthened authority of the papal court and the overpowering
personality of Julius II as in the commanding genius of Bramante and
the unique and inspiring task offered by the rebuilding of St Peter’s.
Under Bramante’s guidance Renaissance architecture entered a new
austere and monumental phase: the ‘grand manner’ of the High Renais-
sance came into its own. The increasing stress on Vitruvian studies,
together with the looming scale of ancient ruins permanently before the
architects’ eyes, led to a more decisive assimilation and codification of the
classical vocabulary. Next to Bramante, it was Fra Giocondo, Peruzzi,
Raphael, Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo who gave the style its
perennial character in Rome.

Although regional differences never entirely disappeared, they were
now, on the authority of the imposing Roman classicism, superseded by
an inter-Italian idiom. Bramante’s Palazzo Caprini and Raphael’s
Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli (1515), both with a rusticated ground-floor and
a compact arrangement of double columns in the piano nobile, were solu-
tions of compelling logic, simplicity and grandeur. This new type was
amplified and modified by Sansovino, Sanmicheli, Palladio and others,
and left its mark not only in Italian towns throughout the sixteenth
century, but on European architecture well into the nineteenth century.

131

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Architectural theory of the Renaissance was much concerned with the
internal organisation of palaces, the arrangement, size, proportions and
decorations of rooms. Many attempts at evolving absolutely regular
plans, analogous to Vitruvius’ description of the ancient house, remained
theoretical exercises on paper. The symmetrical plans of the Palazzo
Strozzi and of Raphael’s unfinished Villa Madama near Rome are rather
exceptional. Not until the post-Renaissance period (after 1550) did sym-
metrical plans become the rule (Palladio).

The origin and development of the Renaissance villa, a type of building
unknown during the Middle Ages, was stimulated by the suburban villa of
classical antiquity. As Pliny the Younger retired after the day’s work to
his villa at Laurentinum, so the wealthy Florentine of the fifteenth century
sought peace in rural solitude. The early Medici villas were simple and
informal buildings; but Giuliano da Sangallo’s villa of Poggio a Caiano
near Florence, built between 1480 and 1485 for Lorenzo the Magnificent,
is a stately house with a classical portico. From then on villas were given
a more formalised and outwardly antique character. The most magnificent
early sixteenth-century suburban villa, the Famesina in Rome, designed
by Raphael and Peruzzi in 1509 for the rich banker Agostino Chigi, con-
tains the finest flowers of High Renaissance art. With Raphael’s late
work, the villa Madama, begun for the future pope Clement VII, the
extension of the planning, the sophistication of the decoration, the
blending of the main building with the large terraced formal garden, a
climax was reached which was followed up in the 1520’s and 1530’s by
such vast enterprises as Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te at Mantua and
Girolamo Genga’s Villa Imperiale near Pesaro.

Renaissance theorists envisaged their ideal city with straight roads
following a geometrical configuration and with every building in its
appointed place. Alberti compared the city to a large house adapted to
the needs of the inhabitants. Francesco di Giorgio, writing after 1482,
explained that all the parts of the city must be proportionate to the whole,
‘just as the members of the human body ’. But most of the Italian towns,
cities like Florence and Siena, Verona, Piacenza and Perugia, had been
given their centres of communal life, their spacious squares, town halls
and public buildings, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries when
the politically powerful city-states flourished. The Renaissance hardly
interfered with the organic patterns of these medieval towns. It was
mainly the Renaissance palace, each one individual with regard to size,
planning and decoration and erected along the existing thoroughfares,
that changed the character of the old cities. The creation of large and
coherent units, like Biagio Rossetti’s new quarters at Ferrara, the laying-
out of St Mark’s Square at Venice (1496 ff.), Bramante’s design of the centre
of Vigevano near Milan (1475-85), his building of new straight streets in
Julius II’s Rome (Via Giulia), Antonio da Sangallo’s symmetrical organis-

132

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

ation of the Piazza SS. Annunziata in Florence (1516 ff.) remained some-
what isolated. The great period of town-planning begins in the late
sixteenth century.

The Renaissance ideals of symmetry and regularity, of simple geo-
metrical shapes, integrity of isolated masses and clarity of articulation
were relatively short-lived. After 1520 there is hardly a pure Renaissance
building. Between 1520 and 1530 the great men of the Renaissance
themselves, Michelangelo, Peruzzi, Antonio da Sangallo, Giulio Romano,
reversed the old values and began to disintegrate the balanced and har-
monious style of the High Renaissance.

The development of sculpture and painting follows a parallel course to
that of architecture. This is not to be wondered at, since specialisation in
the modern sense hardly existed. None of the great Renaissance archi-
tects had a professional training: Bramante began as a painter, and so
did Francesco di Giorgio (1439-1502) and Leonardo, both equally ac-
complished in the theory and practice of all three arts; for Raphael
architecture remained a side-line; and Michelangelo was forty-one years
old when he made his first architectural design, the fagade of S. Lorenzo,
Florence (1516), which was never executed. As in architecture, so in
sculpture and painting a change in the interpretation of antiquity was
coming about at the end of the fifteenth century. The preciousness and
grace of fifteenth-century art was replaced by a heroic and lofty ideal
of vaster scale and nobler proportions, which had its roots in classical
art. In 1477 Botticelli represented in his Primavera the Three Graces as
ethereal dancers united by a beautiful linear rhythm. In about 1500 the
young Raphael painted a small picture of the same subject (Chantilly) in
which he recaptured the very essence of the celebrated ancient marble
group, its composure and poise. Rome, and not Florence, was the obvious
place for this style to mature; and there Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s
achievements in sculpture and painting vied with Bramante’s in archi-
tecture. But whether the new standards were set by the Three Graces
or the Laocoon, enthusiastically hailed by artists when found in 1506,
by the Belvedere Apollo, the Vatican Torso or the Grotesques of the
Golden House of Nero, under the impression of which Raphael perfected
a new mode of decoration (Vatican Loggie, 15 15-21), these classical
works were as a rule no more than representational formulas for an
entirely new content.

This will be evident to anyone who studies the history of Renaissance
tombs; funerary art is at all times a measure of the beliefs of the living.
Although classically dressed up, Florentine tombs of the Early Renais-
sance continue the medieval tradition of placing recumbent effigies on
sarcophagi in arched recesses under religious symbols of redemption.
In one way or another every Renaissance tomb remains focused on the
idea of salvation. This is also true of Antonio Pollaiuolo’s tomb of

133

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Innocent VIII, erected in St Peter’s between 1492 and 1498, on which the
splendid realistic likeness of the pope appears twice, recumbent and
seated in the act of blessing, following the tradition of the Angevin tombs
at Naples. And it is true of Michelangelo’s tomb of Julius II, which
would have been the most gigantic sculptural enterprise of the High
Renaissance, if completed according to the original design. Michel-
angelo’s biographer Condivi talked of this work that occupied him inter-
mittently for fully forty years (1505-45) as the ‘tragedy of the tomb’.
Instead of the more than forty huge marble figures placed round a free-
standing structure to be erected in three tiers in a specially built chapel
adjoining St Peter’s, only a much reduced version found a permanent
home as a wall-tomb in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. In the first
scheme classical ideas of a burial chamber, of apotheosis and triumph
(Victories and Slaves) were interwoven with the concept, derived from
medieval funerary art, of separating a lower terrestrial from an upper
celestial sphere where the Pontiff would have been seen supported by
angels. An intermediary zone with the statues of active and contem-
plative life, of Moses and St Paul would have prepared for the catharsis
of the soul which ascends triumphantly to eternal life. It has been con-
vincingly shown that the unifying concept of the intricate programme was
Neoplatonic, 1 but there is disagreement amongst scholars on many minor
points. To the second considerably altered phase of the tomb after the
pope’s death in 1513 belong the two Slaves in the Louvre and the Moses,
active leader and contemplative thinker in one, who found a place in the
final arrangement of the tomb. During a much later phase (1532)
Michelangelo executed the Victor and the four unfinished Captives in
Florence, the most powerful and most tragic of his works.

Michelangelo realised more fully his dreams as a sculptor in the
Medici Chapel at Florence. Only the initiated know that this work too
is a fragment of a much more extensive scheme (1520-34). Two relatively
unimportant members of the Medici family, Giuliano, duke of Nemours,
and Lorenzo, duke of Urbino, are shown seated in niches above the
sarcophagi on which lie the mighty figures of the four Times of the Day.
The dukes are dressed in Roman armour and many classical concepts are
incorporated in the overall design, but the spiritual centre of the chapel
remains the third wall with the statue of the Virgin between the patron
saints of the Medici. No other monument has given rise to so many and
so contradictory interpretations 2 and, while it cannot be doubted that it is
charged with Neoplatonically coloured Christianity, the precise meaning
of the single figures remains conjectural.

Michelangelo was the only great sculptor during the period under

1 Best survey in E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939).

2 Charles de Tolnay, The Medici Chapel (1948); Panofsky, Iconology, F. Hartt, ‘The
Meaning of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel’, Essays in Honor of Georg Swarzenski (1951).

134

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

discussion. Compared with the timeless greatness of his genius, every-
thing else fades into insignificance. At a time when he harnessed classical
antiquity to the creation of his turbulent, highly personal, grand manner,
Venetian sculptors evolved a classicising High Renaissance idiom, some-
what dry and almost academic, which is best exemplified by Antonio and
Tullio Lombardi’s large reliefs with the Miracles of St Anthony in the Santo
at Padua. While Michelangelo was engaged on the superhuman plans
for the tomb of Julius II, the talented Andrea Sansovino created in the
Basso and Sforza tombs in S. Maria del Popolo, Rome (1505-7), the
most successful High Renaissance wall tombs. He revised the established
form of the Florentine wall tomb by placing the figures in a setting derived
from triumphal arches. Christian virtues and emblems of salvation point
to the spirit in which these triumphs should be understood. From then
on the triumphal motif in tombs became of ever increasing importance.

During the Middle Ages the greatest cycles of sculptural decoration
are to be found on the portals and tympanums of cathedrals. This tra-
dition almost entirely ceased with the rise of the Renaissance. It is not by
chance that, instead of the older encyclopaedic programmes, the two
greatest sculptural enterprises of the High Renaissance, the Julius tomb
and the Medici Chapel, are devoted to mortals, their glorification, transi-
toriness and salvation. This shift proves, if proof were needed, that there
is truth in Burckhardt’s thesis of the ‘discovery of man’ in the Age of the
Renaissance, but it is man conscious of his individual role in the great
plan of redemption. The only important Renaissance monument with a
sculptural programme analogous to those of the cathedrals is the facade
of the Certosa near Pavia. Reliefs, statues, groups and medallions cover
the whole front like a colourful carpet. The leading masters until 1499,
Giovanni Antonio Amadeo and Antonio Mantegazza (d. 1493), and there-
after Benedetto Briosco, who finished the decorations of the main portal
in 1506, were supported by a whole army of sculptors ; and whoever wants
to study Lombard Renaissance sculpture, in which classical detail is
peculiarly submerged in late Gothic emotionalism, must turn to this
faqade rather than to Milan Cathedral. The lowest tier of the decoration
shows oriental sovereigns and Roman kings and emperors together with
mythological and historical figures of antiquity, gleaned from classical
coins and gems. The figures of the classical world appear here as historical
precursors of Christianity, representatives of the empires which preceded the
empire of Christ to which all the decorations of the upper tiers are devoted.

Connection between architecture and sculpture was not discontinued
during the Renaissance, but it differed from the Gothic method of
subordinating sculpture to architecture. Now the niche instead of the
statue was made part of the architectural structure. By removing a statue
from a French cathedral, a structural vacuum is created. As early as the
thirteenth century Italian artists began to reject the merging of sculpture

135

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

and architecture. This native sense for the individuality of three-dimen-
sionally conceived sculpture was in line with the monumental Roman
tradition. The autonomous figure in the niche gained in importance and
became one of the main themes of Renaissance sculptors. In northern
countries artists rejected the antique-Italian autonomous figure until they
came under the spell of the Italian Renaissance. From here it was a short
step to a revival of free-standing commemorative statuary in public squares,
a familiar practice in antiquity. On a few rare occasions the Middle Ages
had anticipated this Renaissance development, which came into its own
when in the year 1504 Michelangelo’s giant David, nude like an ancient
hero, was placed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, a mighty symbol of the
Florentine commune. Verrocchio’s Colleoni (1479-88; finished 1496) was
— in contrast to Donatello’s earlier Gattamelata — the first commemo-
rative equestrian monument placed in a public square (SS. Giovanni
e Paolo, Venice), reviving the tradition of the equestrian statue of Marcus
Aurelius which enjoyed legendary fame in post-classical Rome. Leonardo’s
equestrian monuments to Francesco Sforza, made as a clay model in 1493,
and to Marshal Trivulzio, designed after 1506, were never executed. As
his many studies show, they would have emulated all previous equestrian
statues, but they were to form part of tombs and continued, therefore, the
tradition of the medieval tombs of the Scaligeri at Verona.

Compared with the great mass of religious works, pagan themes play
a small part in Renaissance sculpture. Michelangelo’s career is typical;
there are only the early relief of the Battle of the Centaurs, made at the
time of the Virgin at the Staircase (1490-2), and the life-size drunken
Bacchus at Florence dating from the period of the Piet& in St Peter’s
(1497-1500); a few other classical themes followed in works of the 1520’s
and 1530’s. The bulk of classical subject-matter is to be found in small
objects, medals, plaquettes, bronze reliefs and bronze statuettes. On the
one hand, these objects were regarded as suitable repositories for emble-
matical mysteries which appealed to a humanistically trained clientele;
on the other, they served as fashionable decorations of sitting-room and
study. In antiquity bronze statuettes were placed in the lararium, the
sanctuary of the Roman house where the inhabitants performed their
devotions. While the small Italian bronze derived from classical models,
which were often directly copied, it had acquired an entirely new meaning:
it had become the hallmark of refined taste. The demand for these objects
grew steadily. Ghiberti’s Florentine foundry was the cradle from which
it all started. Donatello, while in Padua, set the north Italian production
in motion; and the Venetian Andrea Riccio (1470-1552), fired by an
unlimited imagination, poured out of his studio an endless number of
small classical bronzes; their immense popularity was due to his activity.

It has become apparent that it would be wrong to assume, as is often
done, that the Renaissance produced a predominantly worldly art, that

136

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

the Gods of Olympus replaced Christ and the host of Saints. On the con-
trary, Renaissance art is first and foremost a religious art.

Raphael’s career begins with a series of representations of the Virgin
and Child, and the most spiritual works of his brush throughout his life
were devoted to this subject. His teacher Perugino (1445-1523) was the
painter of Madonnas par excellence. Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks
(Louvre and London), his Virgin and St Anne (cartoon, Royal Academy)
and, above all, his Last Supper (Milan), Fra Bartolomeo’s (1475-1517)
monumental representations of holy scenes, Andrea del Sarto’s (i486—
1531) sensitive Holy Families, Correggio’s (1494-1534) great altars of
Madonnas and Saints, Giovanni Bellini’s (14307-1516) endless series of
beautifully poised variations of the Madonna theme, Titian’s religious
paintings, numbering well over a hundred — all these show that, as during
the Middle Ages, the interest and activity of painters was still mainly
focused on the religious theme. But different from the often awe-inspiring
medieval cult image, different also from the often somewhat pedestrian
realism of fifteenth-century painters, these artists of the High Renaissance
imbued religious subjects with a humane and idealised quality, a sublime
vision of God become Man, which is without parallel. Raphael achieved
the most perfect realisations of this ideal in pictures of his maturity, such
as the Madonna Alba ( c . 1 51 1, Washington) or the Madonna della Sedia
(1514-15, Florence).

The range of religious painting was extremely wide. An endless number
of small easel pictures had to be produced for private devotion in house
and palace; rich families, the higher clergy and public bodies competed
in adorning churches with altarpieces and cycles of frescoes. Every one
of these large paintings and cycles was worked out in collaboration with
the patrons or even with the help of theological advisers ; and although the
High Renaissance continued the venerable tradition of Christian icono-
graphy, there is always an element of personal devotion, of local or theo-
logical imponderable elements which cannot be understood without precise
historical scrutiny. Thus Titian’s Pesaro Madonna (S. Maria dei Frari,
Venice, 1519-26) is a thanksgiving of Jacopo Pesaro for his victory over the
unbelievers; and while the unfurled standard of the church and a captive
Turk allude to this, St Peter, St Francis and St Anthony of Padua intercede
with the Virgin to procure divine grace for the assembled Pesaro family.

Much more difficult to follow are the allusions and thematic complexi-
ties in the bigger cycles, of which some of the more important may be
mentioned. In the choir of S. Maria Novella, Florence, Domenico
Ghirlandaio turned the scenes from the lives of the Virgin and St John,
painted 1486-90 for the rich banker Giovanni Tomabuoni, into a colourful
chronicle of contemporary Florentine life. It was this kind of typical
Quattrocento painting that Savonarola stigmatised a few years later as
irreverent and irreligious. In the same church, Filippino Lippi painted

137

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

between 1487 and 1502 for the Strozzi family fantastic scenes from the
life of St John the Evangelist and of the Apostle Philip in which reflections
of the hypertrophic religious climate of Savonarola’s revolution may be
sensed. A similar spirit of religious urgency and fervour will be found in
Luca Signorelli’s dramatic, apocalyptic wall paintings in Orvieto Cathedral
(1499-1502) which cannot be deciphered without a learned commentary.
By contrast, Sodoma’s stories from the life of St Benedict, painted between
1505 and 1508 in the cloisters of the great Benedictine house of Monte
Oliveto Maggiore near Siena, are unsophisticated narratives, perfect
illustrations of the peace and dignity of simple monastic life; while Gentile
Bellini’s (1429-1507) and Vittore Carpaccio’s (c. 1455-1526) series of
religious paintings for the oratories of Venetian brotherhoods mirror the
glamour and splendour as well as the homeliness of life in this wealthiest
Renaissance state. The tendencies of Florentine painting between 1510
and 1520 can well be studied in the frescoes of the entrance court to
SS. Annunziata. Here are scenes by Andrea del Sarto from the life of
S. Filippo Benizzi, founder of the order of Servants of Mary; and scenes
from the life of the Virgin by Franciabigio, Pontormo, and Giovan
Battista Rosso, to which Sarto contributed the Nativity of the Virgin
(1513). A comparison with the same subject by Ghirlandaio in S. Maria
Novella illustrates the development of Florentine painting in the inter-
vening twenty-five years, away from preciousness and elegance and from
the wealth of narrative and decorative detail towards a great and noble
rhythmic style with a few carefully placed accents. Moreover, the later
painting reveals a new visionary approach to religious subjects: instead
of a ceiling, the sky opens and an angel with a censer on clouds testifies
to the miracle of this birth.

The ascetic and mystic qualities of Savonarola’s religious teaching and
the force of his personality had a passing but immensely stirring in-
fluence on a limited group of artists. None succumbed more completely
to this influence than the sensitive Botticelli (1444-15 10), as the ecstatic
and passionate style of his late works shows ( Nativity , National Gallery,
London, 1500). The new religious enthusiasm was of a different and less
esoteric kind; it spread after 1510 from the centre of Catholicism, the
papal court, and was intimately connected with a reforming zeal which
found expression in the Lateran Council. Raphael, then working in the
Vatican, registered in his works the changing mood like a seismograph.
While his Madonna under the Baldachin (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) was
painted between 1506 and 1508 in the representative classical style, with
figures completely balanced in expression and composition, his Madonna
di Foligno of only three years later (1511-12, Vatican) is a document of
the new visionary style. The Virgin is no longer on a throne surrounded
by quiet philosophical saints — the customary way of representing this
subject since the fifteenth century — but sits on clouds like an apparition

138

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

from heaven, and is adored with deep ardour by the donor and attending
saints. Raphael’s later Sistine Madonna (1513, Dresden) is the grandest
single work showing this visionary interpretation of a religious theme.

The most progressive artists throughout Italy were remarkably swift to
follow the lead given by Raphael. A study of the development of Sebas-
tiano del Piombo ( Pieta , Viterbo, c. 1520), Lorenzo Lotto, and Gaudenzio
Ferrari, amongst others, proves it. Correggio (1494-1534) changed from
his early, classically poised Virgin with St Francis (Dresden, 1514) to the
sweeping compositions and the bold use of light of the Parma Madonna
della Scodella and the Dresden Nativity (1522 ff.), in which sky and earth
merge; his cupola decorations of S. Giovanni Evangelista at Parma
(1520-4) are the first monumental example of an illusionism which makes
supernatural events a powerful, realistically-felt experience. Even Venice,
in spite of her long independent political, mercantile and cultural tradition,
followed the general trend. Titian’s St Mark (Venice, c. 1510), showing a
peaceful assembly of saints symmetrically arranged in the manner of the well-
established type of the sacra conversazione, is soon followed by such dyna-
mic and visionary works as the Assumption in S. Maria dei Frari (1516-18)
and the altarpiece at Ancona (1520), where in the unreal gloom of the even-
ing inspired saints are deeply moved by the mirage of the Virgin on clouds.

Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, the epitome of
Renaissance religious imagery, painted between 1508 and 1512, are also
theologically speaking of unequalled profundity. Along the walls of the
chapel, erected under Pope Sixtus IV between 1473 and 1481, there
existed frescoes representing scenes from the life of Moses and Christ. In
keeping with the old-established concordance between the Old and the
New Testament, events of the former prefigure those of the latter. These
frescoes, which have therefore not only a literal but above all a symbolic
meaning, were painted by the most celebrated artists of the day — Botticelli,
Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Signorelli, and the less eminent Cosimo Rosselli.
Historically, the reign of law, beginning with the life of Moses, was followed
by the reign of grace, beginning with the life of Christ. Michelangelo
completed the historical cycle of the walls by painting on the ceiling nine
scenes illustrating the period before the reign of law. He rendered the
story from the Creation to Original Sin, and further from the ensuing
great catastrophe, the Flood, to the mocking of the drunken Noah by his
sons. The central panels end pessimistically with the humiliation of the
ancestor of the new race of mankind. Under these principal scenes are
the enthroned figures of prophets and sibyls ; and above their thrones are
seated nudes of extraordinary beauty, holding up bronze-coloured medal-
lions with scenes from the Book of Kings. These, like the large liberation
scenes from the history of the Jewish people in the four comer spandrels,
represent different prefigurations of Christian salvation. Finally, the
ancestors of Christ in the eight spandrels and fourteen lunettes of the

139

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

walls show the physical succession from Noah down to Christ. Thus the
spiritual link between the pre-Christian and the Christian era represented by
the prophets and sibyls finds a parallel in the physical link of the ancestors.

The history of Bible exegesis from Early Christian times onwards shows
that the literal reading of the scriptures must be supplemented by sym-
bolical interpretation. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
vast illustrated compendia of this nature were produced, which still had
very wide currency in printed editions throughout the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries. The conclusion must therefore be drawn that, just like
the corner spandrels and the medallions of the Sistine ceiling, the central
panels also adumbrate revealed truth. In fact, an intricate web of theo-
logical allusions proves that these scenes illustrate symbolically the
mysteries of Christ’s Passion . 1 It is precisely this that, in the view of
Renaissance interpreters, the prophecies of Hebrew and classical seers
implied. On the symbolical level, therefore, the entire ceiling forms a
coherent whole, while the central panels continue the story of the older
wall paintings which ended with the Last Supper. The language of re-
ligious symbolism is no longer understood, and one example of its hand-
ling should therefore illustrate it. Exactly in the centre of the ceiling is
painted the Creation of Eve. Since the time of the Fathers of the Church,
this event was regarded as a symbol of the Church. St Augustine compares
Adam’s sleep with the death of Christ; and, as Adam’s side was opened
and Eve extracted from his rib, so from Christ’s side on the Cross flowed
the blood, the sacrament on which the Church was built. The creation of
Eve as a simile of the creation of the Church was so generally accepted
that most printed bibles of the sixteenth century show this scene as
frontispiece without any further comment.

At a first glance, the Sistine ceiling appears to be stylistically homogeneous.
This, however, is not the case. There is a gradual change of scale from
the (original) entrance towards the altar. The more one approaches the
creation scenes, starting with the Mocking of Noah, the more colossal
grow the figures and the more unreal is the space in which the scenes are
set. In the Creation of Eve the figure of God the Father transcends the
frame of the picture. Hereafter, this figure absorbs the entire interest,
and everything is concentrated on the dynamic act of creation. It is this
God the Father storming through empty spaces who has kindled the
imagination of later generations perhaps more than any other painted
figure, for never before or since has the mystery of primeval creation been
rendered with such supernatural power. The crescendo which can be
followed from the east to the west end of the chapel reaches its climax in

1 For controversies about the symbolism of the ceiling, see: Charles de Tolnay, Michel-
angelo , vol. il (1945); E. Wind, ‘Sante Pagnini and Michelangelo’, Gaz. d. Beaux-Arts,
lxxxvi (1944); idem, ‘The Ark of Noah’, Measure, 1 (1950), p. 411 ; idem, in Art Bulletin,
xxxni (1951), p. 41 ; F. Hartt, ‘Lignum Vitae in medio Paradisi’, Art Bulletin, xxxii (1950),
pp. H5ff., 181 ff. and 239; idem, in Art Bulletin, xxxiii (1951), p. 262.

140

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

these creation scenes. The early parts of the Sistine ceiling display the
balance and poise characteristic of the situation of about 1510; while the
later more heroic, dynamic and visionary parts go with the general change
of style which has been discussed. In fact, it was the Michelangelo of
the Sistine ceiling who set the pace of the new development, and even
influenced Raphael.

Profane history painting in the modem sense, as an accurate rendering
of past events, was unknown during the Renaissance. And yet history
painting played a vital part in artistic theory as well as practice. The
pictorial treatment of historical subjects shows many different facets, and
no simple formula for their interpretation can be given. But two general
observations are worth making : first, that painters regarded it as obligatory
to stress the permanent rather than the passing and accidental charac-
teristics of an event; and secondly, that the great majority of works of
this class is devoted to ecclesiastical history, or in some way or other
linked with it. Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s battle-pieces, commis-
sioned in 1503 and 1504 by the Signoria for two walls of the hall of the
Great Council in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, are rather exceptional.
But even these idealised commemorative representations of Florentine
victories over the Pisans and Milanese would have existed under the
shadow of a great statue of the Saviour, the ideal centre of the hall, if the
political situation had favoured completion of the programme. The murals,
too, never reached the stage of execution. In spite of this, the spectacle
of these two giants of the Renaissance competing in this unusual task
made a profound and lasting impression. Leonardo’s cartoon of the
Battle for the Flag remained the unsurpassed model of later battle-scenes,
while Michelangelo’s Bathers set the standard for the study and inter-
pretation of the nude.

Pinturicchio’s ten large frescoes in the library of Siena Cathedral
(1503-8), illustrating in a retrogressive style with light-hearted naivete the
life of the Piccolomini pope Pius II, come perhaps nearer to a straight-
forward historical narrative than any other historical cycle. But the
precious characterisation and the imaginary setting of these stories,
studded with classical detail, reveal the painter’s intention to render the
rarefied atmosphere of super-personal events. Ten years earlier, the same
Pinturicchio had painted in the Vatican Palace for Pope Alexander VI a
series of rooms, in one of which he displayed in great detail the story of the
sacred Egyptian bull Apis. A bull figured in the Borgia coat of arms, and
Alexander implied by the painted programme that he traced the origin
of his family to Apis himself. There is clearly a magical element in this
story; for although the bull is shown bowing before the successor of
Christ, he has imparted his vitality and strength to the Borgia family, and
is thus the mainspring of Alexander’s rise to the highest position in
Christendom. This somewhat barbarian ‘totemistic’ story is yet a link

xa 141 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

in the unbroken Euhemerist tradition according to which the gods and
heroes of antiquity were mythical ancestors of great families and founders
of towns and communities.

By far the greatest historical cycle and, taken as a whole, the most
sublime creation of the High Renaissance are the frescoes of Raphael’s
Stanze, decorations of some interconnected papal rooms in the Vatican
Palace, hardly a stone’s throw from Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling.
Raphael finished the first stanza (‘Stanza della Segnatura’) in the course
of three years (1509-12) almost single-handed, concurrently with Michel-
angelo’s frescoes. It is probably correct to say that the murals of these
four walls represent the fullest Renaissance revision of the medieval
encyclopaedia; no more than the barest outline can be given of the
accretion, abundance and subtlety of ideas, to the expression of which
Raphael’s idiom was singularly congenial. Vividly acting groups of historic
figures personify the constituent forces of human society: the domain of
the spirit is shown in the theological disputation over the miracle of the
Eucharist, known as the Disputa; that of thought, opposite, in the
philosophical disputation — led by Plato and Aristotle — of the School of
Athens. Rational and metaphysical knowledge — ‘ acquired and revealed
science’ in thomistic language — are the pillars on which cognition of
truth rests. The third wall illustrates the domain of Justice, which makes
the moral order of human affairs possible; and the fourth, the Parnassus,
that of imagination and enthusiasm — an exposition of the Platonic concept
that without the experience of inspired rapture, which musicians and poets
express in their songs, no individual soul, no society, and not even the
universe can exist. In this stanza Raphael brilliantly translated abstract
thought into visual language. The great and simple form, the unsurpassed
dignity of his serene and lucid style, and the compositional device of care-
fully balanced contrasts combine to raise the literary programme, prepared
by learned advisers of the papal court, into the sphere of high ideality.

Between the summer of 1512 and the summer of 1514 Raphael executed
the frescoes of the Stanza d’Eliodoro with the help of pupils. The pro-
gramme changed from learned speculations of a general character to
direct reflections on the exciting political events of the day. However, the
four paintings, representing the Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple,
the Mass of Bolsena, Pope Leo’s meeting with Attila, and the liberation of
St Peter from prison reveal their meaning only to the initiated. Pope
Leo I in the meeting with Attila bears the features of the reigning Pope
Leo X; as his great forerunner miraculously delivered Rome from the
Huns, so Leo X by his victory at Novara cleared Italy of the French in-
vader. The other frescoes, too, depict modern events through the medium
of venerable stories from history and legend. Not only is the recent event
ennobled by the parallel with the past one, but more than this: by ex-
pressing one event through the other, each painting becomes a symbol of

142

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

the eternal greatness of the Church. These paintings are thus visual sym-
bols of an exalted mystery which could only be conveyed by this particular
form of allegorical history painting. Raphael adjusted his style to this
new task; in all these frescoes, those who have faith and are protected
by God are characterised by calm verticals, while the fear, terror and
surprise of the unenlightened is expressed by rapid, diagonal movements
and physical contortions.

In the third room, the Stanza dell’Incendio, painted under Raphael’s
direction mainly by pupils between 1514 and 1517, the relation between
contemporary occurrences and time-honoured ecclesiastical history is
somewhat modified. All four frescoes show the reigning Pope Leo X
impersonating his forerunners Leo III and Leo IV. But these paintings
disclose no parallels between similar historical situations; they allude to
the proceedings of the Lateran Council, and must be understood as
metaphors expressing fundamental dogmas of the Church. The Bor go
Fire, showing the pope quelling a catastrophe in the year 849 by making
the sign of the Cross, confirms the miraculous power of the Church; the
Battle of Ostia, illustrating Leo IV’s victory over the Saracens, extols her
all-embracing character, the Coronation of Charlemagne the supremacy
of Papacy, and the Oath of Leo III the responsibility of the clergy to
God alone.

The four large frescoes of the Sala di Constantino, begun after 1517,
but carried out after Raphael’s death between 1523 and 1524, tell the tale
of how Christianity was raised to its status of world religion. The pro-
gramme logically starts with the appearance of the Cross to Constantine,
followed by his battle against Maxentius, his baptism and the foundation
of the papal state by Constantine’s donation. Although the programme
of the four stanze was in no way devised as a whole, it still expounds a
uniform cycle of ideas.The Segnatura frescoes show the Church in relation
to the other fundamental forces in human life, the Stanza d’Eliodoro
glorifies the triumph of the Church, the Stanza dell’Incendio propagates her
articles of faith, and the Sala di Constantino relates the story of her origin.

With each of the first three stanze Raphael set a stylistic example of
the greatest importance. The Segnatura frescoes will always be regarded
as the high-water mark of ‘classical’ Renaissance aspirations. In the
dramatic style of the Stanza d’Eliodoro he developed principles which,
characteristically, were taken up a hundred years later when painting
reflected the religious enthusiasm of the Catholic Restoration, and with
some justification the style of this stanza has occasionally been labelled
‘proto-baroque’. With the style of the Stanza dell’Incendio, perfectly
adapted to the dogmatic programme, Raphael inaugurated the two main
trends of sixteenth-century mannerism. The Fire in the Borgo and, above
all, the Battle of Ostia lead to the discordant style of which Vasari’s
mid-sixteenth-century elaborate schemes are typical; the Coronation of

143 12 ' 3

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Charlemagne and the Oath of Leo ///find a continuation in the consciously
simplified dogmatic style of masters like Federigo Zuccaro in the second
half of the century.

The border-line between history painting, allegorical and mythological
pictures is not easy to draw. History painting, it appeared, was given an
allegorical cloak, while allegory may be represented through the veil of
history or mythology, and mythology may have an allegorical meaning.
Pictorial language is more ambiguous than words; and Renaissance
artists, continuing a long tradition, rarely made representation and meaning
coincide. Thus when Raphael’s teacher, Perugino, was commissioned in
1496 to represent twelve life-size ancient heroes on the walls of the as-
sembly hall of the wealthy guild of money-lenders, the Cambio, at
Perugia, their quasi-allegorical character was made evident; for they are
shown in groups of three under the personifications of the cardinal virtues
which they are meant to exemplify. Ever since Petrarch wrote his work
about famous men of antiquity, their courage and justice, their warlike
and civic qualities were regarded as models for the modems to follow. It
is for this reason that the ancient exemplars fitted perfectly into the world
of Christian ethics.

The representation of classical mythology was not due to a sudden
pagan revival, as older writers on the Renaissance believed. More recent
studies have revealed how tenaciously the ancient gods survived the ages. 1
The Middle Ages infused new life into them, and the Renaissance ad-
ministered that heritage, as is shown by the fact that Boccaccio’s Genealogy
of the Gods remained the principal source book. After the first printed
edition of 1472, four further editions were necessary during the fifteenth
century, and innumerable more in the course of the sixteenth. Corres-
ponding to the traditional Bible exegesis, Boccaccio maintained that a
myth has four layers of meaning — literal, moral, allegorical and meta-
physical. In considering mythological Renaissance pictures this must not
be lost sight of, although every case should be approached on its merits,
and will only reveal its meaning if the salient circumstances have been
fully investigated.

When Isabella d’Este, one of the most avid collectors and discriminating
patrons of the Renaissance, decided to have her private study in the
Palace at Mantua decorated with a coherent cycle by great masters, she
chose mythological scenes, but wrote in a letter: ‘We desire to have in our
study paintings of allegorical subjects by the best painters in Italy.’ Amongst
the paintings was Mantegna’s Parnassus (1497, now Louvre), one of the
most beautiful and accomplished works of allegorical mythology. While this
picture seems to glorify the civilising influence of poetry and music, a counter-
part painted by the same master and finished in 1502, showing as main

1 See, above all, the writings by A. Warburg, F. Saxl and E. Panofsky, all quoted in
J. Seznec, La survivance des dieux antiques (1940), Eng. translation (1953).

I44

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

protagonists Athena and Venus, teaches the lesson, translated into pedes-
trian language, that Vice must be expelled by Virtue. These and other
mythologies of the same cycle are embellished with an infinite variety of
learned allusions. This cycle is of particular interest because the pro-
gramme for one of the pictures, written by Isabella’s humanist adviser,
Paride da Ceresara, and bristling with weird erudition, has survived.
Pallas and Diana had to be shown fighting Venus and Cupid, symbolising
the Battle of Love and Chastity. The painter, Perugino, was tied down to
the minutest detail, and expressly forbidden to introduce anything of his
own invention. The picture reached Mantua in 1505. It aroused no
enthusiasm; clearly this formidable task went beyond the capability of
the tame painter of sweet Madonnas.

Isabella’s brother, Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, stimulated by his sister’s
enterprise, decided to have a room of his castle similarly decorated. In the
refined intellectual atmosphere of Alfonso’s court, which counted Ariosto
amongst its luminaries, the programme differed from that of Isabella ; it
was entirely devoted to the humanist interpretation of Love. The aged
Giovanni Bellini began, shortly before his death, a strange, somewhat
burlesque and not yet fully explained Feast of the Gods, later to be finished
by Titian (Washington), and the latter contributed three Bacchanals
(1516-23) now in Madrid and London, two of which are precise illus-
trations of scenes described by the Greek writer Philostratus. No more
accomplished north Italian Renaissance interpretations of a classical text
exist; they translate the literary concept into free, infinitely rich and har-
monious painterly compositions. But again, they are more than pure
illustrations. Philostratus himself had pointed the moral of the Bacchanal
of Children. Love, he explained, symbolised by the play of the cupids,
governs all that is mortal. The love over which Venus presides is sensuous
love, and yet these cupids show all the stages of love ‘from its first
dawning to eternal duration’. One is reminded that eternal love in Chris-
tian terms is Charity, and it is likely that Titian and his advisers endeavoured
to blend in these pictures Christian conceptions with current Neoplatonic
theories of love.

This may be supported by reference to Titian’s so-called Sacred and
Profane Love (c. 1515, Rome), one of the happiest of his creations,
breathing an atmosphere of peace and beatitude. It has been, we think,
correctly argued 1 that the nude Venus represents the higher principle;
for celestial Beauty, that beauty which is eternal and unchangeable, is as
naked as Truth. Her counterpart, adorned with all the worldly charms, is
the principle of visible, tangible and perishable terrestrial beauty. But
these two forms of Platonic beauty adumbrate the two principles of
Christian love — the love of God and the love of one’s neighbour — which
together inform the highest Christian virtue, Charity. The attributes of

1 Panofsky, Iconology.

145

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Titian’s twin Venuses resemble closely those given to traditional represen-
tations of Charity. It is not easy nowadays fully to grasp the overtones or
undertones of Renaissance mythological and quasi-mythological pictures.
However, this class of picture was always exclusive, painted for a clientele
which had imbibed current philosophical and humanist ideas. With regard
to pictures like Leonardo’s Leda , only preserved in copies, Giorgione’s
Dresden Venus, or Titian’s later representations of Venus (Florence,
Madrid), we are groping more or less in the dark. But this much can be
said — that these works established the High Renaissance ideal of female
beauty; a sublime, noble and infinitely delicate beauty which could not
have been developed without the almost religious Neoplatonic yearning
for the beautiful soul in the beautiful body. It is the same spirit which
made Michelangelo represent the Virgin of his Pieta in St Peter’s in a
state of eternal youth, and which informed the bodily perfection of the
nude youths of the Sistine ceiling.

Correggio’s decoration of a room of the former convent of S. Paolo at
Parma (1518-19) is perhaps the most fascinating document of the use of
mythology and allegory serving a Christian content. Here are shown
Diana and her cortege. Faun and Vestal, sacrifices and libations, the
Graces and Fates, Venus and Juno, together with allegories of simplicity
and virginity, nature and immortality. This was the dining-room of the
abbess Giovanna Piacenza, the patroness, who, immortalised in the large
painting of Diana, remains for ever the vigilant custodian of chastity. Its
triumph was here expressed by the medieval allegorical method, while the
learned antiquarian detail and the classical and sensuous pictorial language
are typical of the High Renaissance.

Raphael’s Cupid and Psyche cycle in the Villa Famesina, begun c. 1518,
is the monumental Roman counterpart to Titian’s Bacchanals. The
painter chose twelve episodes from Apuleius’ charming story to decorate
the spandrels and ceiling of the once open loggia. Raphael died on
6 April 1520, five days before his patron Agostino Chigi, and left the
frescoes to be finished by pupils. The cycle not only constitutes a climax
of the High Renaissance reconciliation of the textual and formal tradition
of antiquity, but this eloquent and serene hymn to love also recaptures
the fairy-tale spirit of its source. By thus feeling and revealing the poetical
quality of the ancient myth, Raphael opened new avenues of approach
to classical antiquity. In these frescoes, as well as in the earlier fresco of
Galatea's Triumph (1514) in an adjoining room, stimulated perhaps by
some verses in Politian’s Giostra, Raphael’s style is classical and sculptural,
and individual pieces of ancient statuary served as models for some of the
figures. A comparison with the style of his contemporary religious imagery
and the later Stanze shows that, at the summit of his power, this great
master changed his idiom to suit the subject-matter.

The decoration of the Farnesina as a whole gives an unequalled insight

146

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

into certain ‘ pagan ’ aspects of the High Renaissance. Agostino Chigi’s
bedroom on the first floor is suitably decorated with Sodoma’s free inter-
pretation of Lucian’s (second century a.d.) description of the wedding of
Alexander and Roxana ; and other rooms contain Peruzzi’s mythological
friezes of the loves of the gods after Ovid. But in the Galatea room there
is also Peruzzi’s ceiling, which illustrates in mythological terms a precise
celestial chart of the northern sky on i December 1466. This was the date
of Agostino Chigi’s birth. The ceiling therefore illustrates a monumental
horoscope of the patron. It reflects the enormous vogue of astrology at
this period. It was the power of the classical gods as planets and con-
stellations that had for long invested them with a sinister vitality. The
antagonism to Christianity expressed in these frescoes is revealed by the
belief in a fatalistic determinism as opposed to divine providence, rather
than in the familiar contrast of paganism and Christianity.

In order to understand the full breadth of Agostino’s princely patronage,
it should not be forgotten how much the Church profited from his
liberality. Amongst other things, Raphael’s frescoes of prophets and
sibyls in S. Agostino, Rome (1514), and the sepulchral chapel of the family
in S. Maria del Popolo, designed by Raphael and decorated by him and
Sebastiano del Piombo, will for ever be connected with his name.

Since Dante had described his vision of the Church riding on ‘a car
triumphal’ and Petrarch written his allegorical epic Trionfi, triumphal
arches and triumphal processions all'antica played an ever-increasing
part in the festive life of the Renaissance. Mythological, allegorical and
historical triumphs were acted and represented for the celebration of
weddings, the receptions of honoured guests or victorious commanders.
And it is characteristic of the spirit of the Renaissance that the classical
triumph could be harnessed to the services of the Church. In 1491
Lorenzo the Magnificent had the Triumph of Aemilius Paulus from the
description of Plutarch represented to celebrate the feast of St John; in
1506 Julius II entered Bologna on a triumphal car; the triumph of
Camillus was shown at Leo X’s entry into Florence. Titian’s woodcuts
of the Triumph of Faith{ 15 10) showing Christ in a car drawn by the Doctors
of the Church, preceded and followed by the patriarchs and sibyls, mar-
tyrs and confessors, is evidence that the classical conception was well
suited to glorify the Church triumphant, implying at the same time that
the triumphs of Christianity had superseded those of antiquity. Similarly
pagan sacrifices, common in religious imagery of the Renaissance, were
meant to foreshadow the sacrifice of Christ that had superseded them.

Just as Andrea Riccio’s bronze candlestick in the Santo at Padua and
his reliefs for the Della T orre tomb (Louvre) show archaeologically accurate
sacrifices, so Mantegna in the nine large cartoons of the Triumph of
Caesar (c. 1485-94), now at Hampton Court, made it a point of honour to
emulate antiquity itself. Nobody before him had developed the triumphal

147

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

theme either in such a monumental way or with such archaeological
erudition. Here are the trophies and statuary, the sacrificial vessels and
prisoners, all studied and gleaned from ancient monuments and descrip-
tions of classical triumphs as found in Appian, Suetonius and Josephus.
The north Italian approach to antiquity was always more archaeological
than that of central Italy, and in this respect his Triumph reflects the par-
ticular character of northern humanism. But the erudition noticeable in
this work is not pedantic; it is a highly personal, imaginative and even
fantastic creation, in which classical detail has been assembled to form
something quite new — a typical Renaissance entity. Mantegna’s Triumph,
painted for Marchese Francesco Gonzaga, was later arranged by his son
Federigo in a room of the Mantuan palace in such a way that its panels
framed a picture by Lorenzo Costa (1522), which recorded Federigo’s
own triumph on the occasion of his victorious participation in the battle of
Pavia. Thus, by linking his career with the great Roman imperial tradition,
Federigo gave lustre to his own military success.

In contrast to Mantegna’s antiquarianism, Perugino’s ancient heroes
in the Cambio at Perugia are clad in fanciful dress which ultimately derived
from the Burgundian court style, fashionable in Italy throughout the
fifteenth century. While in this as in many other cases the rich and strange
costume was meant to indicate historical distance rather than historical
fidelity, at the beginning of the sixteenth century — simultaneously with
the cogent classicism to be found in all the three arts — compliance with
archaeologically established facts became the rule. Indeed, anything else
would then have appeared as perverting the truth. From then on, such
fidelity belonged to the requirements of ‘propriety ’, one of the pillars of
Renaissance art theory (p. 15 1).

From the birth of art theory as a proper aesthetic discipline, that is,
from the beginning of the fifteenth century onwards to the end of the
eighteenth century, portraiture as an imitative art ranked lower than the
subjects from history, mythology and the Scriptures. It would, therefore,
seem logical to infer that portraiture should have been shunned by
patrons and artists alike. However, the reverse is true. From the first
half of the fifteenth century onwards, the new type of self-contained easel
portrait occupied an important position in artistic production, and the
demand for portraits steadily grew. The greatest artists during the first
quarter of the sixteenth century, Leonardo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian,
Lotto — with the one memorable exception of Michelangelo — produced
portraits in considerable numbers. It was these High Renaissance artists
who solved the contradiction between a theoretical refusal and the actual
practice of portrait painting. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (1502, Louvre) is
the first great example of a veritable revolution in portraiture. While the
formal elements of this portrait — half-figure, three-quarter view, eyes
meeting the beholder, distant landscape — reveal Italian fifteenth-century

148

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

and, in addition, Flemish prototypes, the earlier customary realism was
here replaced by a vision of an inscrutable physical and spiritual perfection
of the sitter, before which the world has always bowed in admiration.
Raphael’s early portraits of Angelo and Maddalena Doni (Florence),
painted shortly after he had settled in Florence in 1 504, show the impact
of Leonardo’s new approach. But Leonardo’s spiritualisation and idealisa-
tion of the sitter is still missing. Raphael’s change from the Maddalena
Doni to the Lady with the Veil (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) or from Angelo
Doni to the portrait of Baldesar Castiglione (Louvre) must be seen not
only as a stylistic development towards broader, fuller and more rhyth-
mical forms, but above all as a development towards the spiritual ideal of
refined humanity which Leonardo had established in his Mona Lisa.
Raphael’s portraits of about 1515 express the new conception of man,
temperate, noble and dignified, to which his friend Castiglione himself
erected a lasting literary monument in his immensely influential Courtier.

Nobody rendered this humane ideal more fully than Titian. In many of
his portraits he dispensed entirely with accessories. The heads embody
the ideal of the well-groomed, controlled and perfectly balanced per-
sonality. Often he replaced the traditional half-length by the three-
quarter length, for the graceful deportment of the figure, the simple and
careful elegance of the dress — all this was now important for the charac-
terisation of the sitter; while the warm colours of his broad painterly
brushwork facilitate human contact between sitter and spectator.

The idealisation attempted by, and demanded from, the painter was
not to undermine realistic likeness. No finer character studies exist than
Raphael’s portraits of Julius II and Leo X, or Titian’s likeness of his
friend Aretino and of many a humanist of his day. It is in this recon-
ciliation of idealised vision and realistic appearance that the subtle task of
the portrait painter consisted. Only when he surpasses nature by forming
an inner vision of his sitter — that is, only by a process of idealised subli-
mation — is he able to raise portraiture, according to the Plato-inspired
Renaissance theory, from mere imitation to the level of ‘high’ art.

The new type of Renaissance man longed for a retreat into a happy
Utopia. What the chivalrous romances and the love poetry of the trou-
badours had been for the Middle Ages, Arcady became for people from
the Renaissance onwards. Theocritus’ pastoral idylls and Virgil’s bucolic
poetry found their Renaissance apogee in Sannazzaro’s Arcadia (1502).
And while Politian in Florence, Boiardo and later Tasso at Ferrara, and
Molza in Rome poured forth their elegiac songs, while pastoral plays
and masques became fashionable about the year 1500, Lorenzo de’
Medici resurrected Arcady in his Fiesole villa, for which Signorelli
probably painted his nostalgic Pan (destroyed, formerly Berlin, c. 1490),
and Giorgione created a pictorial vision of arcadian innocence.

Giorgione is probably the most evasive genius of the Renaissance.

149

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Whenhedied in 1510 he was about 33 years old. Considering his enormous
reputation amongst contemporaries, he must have left a fair number of
paintings, but nowadays opinions differ widely over the attribution of
pictures to him. One would be inclined to say that an artist about whose
work experts cannot agree is not a clearly defined personality. And yet,
the opposite is the case. The name Giorgione evokes quite definite asso-
ciations, for which Walter Pater in his famous essay found beautiful words.
It was precisely the singular poetical quality of Giorgione’s art which
captivated other masters to such a degree that their work appears like an
extension of his. Giorgione set his figures in a wide landscape, and made
figures and landscape express the same mood. The landscape itself, with
its clumps of dark trees, its peaceful undulating movement and its mys-
terious golden light, has the emotive quality of the elegiac melancholic
paradise that is Arcady. To translate thus the Arcady of the poets into
visual language was an achievement of first-rate importance; and this
explains why Giorgione’s art appeared to his contemporaries as a fasci-
nating revelation. Giorgione brought to perfection tendencies which had
a home in Venice. Venetian artists had always tried to express moods by
colour, in contrast to artistic trends in Florence, where colour remained
accessory to line and design. In the work of some older artists, parti-
cularly in the landscape backgrounds of pictures by Giovanni Bellini and
Vittore Carpaccio, one can trace how the ground was prepared for Gior-
gione’s genius. In addition, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poli-
phili, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499 and embellished with many
woodcuts, helped to spread a dreamland romanticism. But Giorgione’s
art must not be regarded as expressing a vague lyrical and elegiac senti-
ment. In accordance with the requirements of his time, the paintings always
relate definite stories. It remains one of the mysteries of the mysterious
Giorgione that the exact meaning of some of his most important pictures,
like the Tempest (Venice), the Magi (Vienna) and The Concert (Louvre)
still defies interpretation.

More than once in these pages reference has been made to the creation
of art theory as a discipline in its own right. Ever since Renaissance
artists introduced the dogma of art as a science — ever since Alberti and
Leonardo propounded that practice must be based on theory — the status
of the artist in society, his relation to his patrons and the conception of
his own calling began to change. It was theory that equipped the indi-
vidual artist for his struggle with reality.

Art theory was concerned with two principal problems — that of repre-
sentational correctness and that of beauty. The former was achieved
through the theory and practice of perspective, the study of bodies and
of anatomy, of botany, zoology and the wide field of natural phenomena.
Hence Alberti’s demand: ‘First draw the figure nude; then show it
dressed ’ — an advice accepted by the great Renaissance artists, as can be

150

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

seen in innumerable preparatory drawings by Leonardo, Raphael and
others ; hence the passionate study of anatomy and the dissecting of bodies,
pursued most indefatigably of all by Michelangelo and Leonardo. Seven
hundred and seventy-nine sheets of Leonardo’s planned ‘Anatomy’ were
still extant at the end of the sixteenth century. Hence also Leonardo’s
infinite labour in trying to decode the secrets of nature by a strictly
empirical method of observation and experiment. Beauty, on the other
hand, an echo or reflection of divine order, could only be achieved by
using those proportions on which the harmony of the universe is based.
‘Proportion’, Leonardo exclaimed, ‘is found not only in numbers and
measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and places, and in every
force. . . . ’ A theory of expression and propriety had to be allied to that of
proportion to guarantee beauty in a work of art. Leonardo, in particular,
on the basis of Alberti’s findings, demanded that the artist must convinc-
ingly express the passions and emotions, and that these must be pre-
cisely related to the dramatic content of the story. His Last Supper
provides an object-lesson in the application of his theory. Since these
artists believed in the moral purpose of their work, the theory of expression
held a place of special importance. Again using Alberti’s definitions,
Leonardo explained that propriety or decorum consisted in the appro-
priateness of gesture, dress and locality. Thus propriety was equivalent
to historical truth, and in classical circles the demand for it never abated.
When Raphael designed the Feast of the Ancient Gods for the ceiling of
the Famesina, propriety required that the participants should lie on
triclinia or couches, the antique fashion of taking meals.

In all the discussion about expression, decorum and historical truth,
the comparison with poetry was ready at hand. If one could prove that
painting and poetry were two realisations of the same thing, then painting
would be raised to the noble rank of poetry. Horace’s phrase from the
Ars Poetica: ‘ut pictura poesis’ — ‘as is painting, so is poetry’ — supplied
the classical verdict. From the end of the fifteenth to the end of the
eighteenth century the affinity between poetry and painting was indeed
regarded as being very close. Like poetry, it was argued, painting is
concerned with the imitation of human action, and like the poet the
painter should choose his themes from sacred and profane history and
from the great exemplars of the past. Like the poet, he must express
hu m an emotions, and not only please but also inform — arouse emotions
in his audience and impart wisdom to mankind. Like the poet, finally
the artist ascends through knowledge to inspiration, ‘that divine power
which transforms his mind into the likeness of the divine mind ’ (Leonardo).

Although in theory Alberti had raised the profession of an artist from
a craft to ‘high art’, it took a long time even in Florence until the new
attitude had results in practice. Throughout the fifteenth century artists
were still recruited from the lower middle class. It was rare for sons of

151

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

intellectuals, civil servants or of the aristocracy to become artists. If a boy
from a good family insisted on an artist’s career, it was more honourable
to apprentice him as a painter than as a sculptor, for painters belonged
to the guild of the apothecaries, whereas sculptors ranked as stonemasons
with the bricklayers. A well-authenticated anecdote from Michelangelo’s
life shows that in his days the old notions were thrown overboard, at least
in the progressive Florentine circles. His family belonged to the old
burgher-nobility of Florence, and the father, therefore, opposed the son’s
determination to become an artist. In the end he consented to apprentice
him to the painter Ghirlandaio (1488). When Lorenzo the Magnificent
discovered Michelangelo’s gift as a sculptor, the father declared that he
would never permit a son of his to be a stone-cutter; he consented only
after Lorenzo had explained to him the difference between a stone-cutter
and the modem conception of a sculptor.

It was at this period that the medieval craftsman-employee developed
into the modern artist and the employer into the patron. Lorenzo the
Magnificent, a great Maecenas and collector and altogether the quint-
essence of the modern patron, inaugurated with his venture in the garden
of S. Marco the new type of artistic education. Here young artists, among
them Michelangelo, worked under the supervision of the aged sculptor
Bertoldo ; and although the precise character of the enterprise, which only
existed for about three years until Lorenzo’s death in 1492, is unknown, it
can yet be said that for the first time traditional apprenticeship was re-
placed by a free and liberal education in which the first germs of later
academies of art may be found.

During the fifteenth century, it was still common for artists, even of the
first rank, to be prepared to accept any occasional work. They undertook
designs not only for such transient occasions as festivals, but also for
chests and curtains, pennons and trappings of horses. In the beginning
of the sixteenth century, all this changed. It throws a light on the new
social position of artists and the respect for their genius that Vasari in the
Lives of Artists , published in 1550, constantly returns to the slur cast on
the dignity of the profession by requests for this kind of low-class work.
With the new freedom, the artist himself as a type began to change, and
from the end of the fifteenth century onwards one begins to discern those
special characteristics which are still often associated with artists. We now
hear of their extravagant tastes and habits. Artists like the sculptor
Gianfrancesco Rustici (1474-1554), for a time Leonardo’s collaborator,
and, it seems, the first example of a nobleman who practised art for his
own satisfaction, the painter Sodoma (1477-1549), Piero di Cosimo
(1462-1521) and Pontormo (1494-1556) were all notoriously eccentric.
Piero di Cosimo lived as a recluse in dirt and squalor; his strange and
abstruse pictures of primeval life (New York and Oxford) seem to reveal
something of his troubled mind. Pontormo completely cut himself off

152

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

from the world. It is perhaps not accidental that it was this melancholic,
above all, who in the years around 1520 headed the revolt against the
equipoise of the High Renaissance.

It is a sign of the new era that artists insisted more and more on creating
in solitude. Michelangelo never allowed anybody to see the work in
hand. Many of them also began to work spasmodically; furiously creative
periods alternated with long pauses. The continuity of the medieval work-
shop tradition was irrevocably broken. It needed a new type of patron to
tolerate the new type of artist ; one who recognised and admired genius,
and was therefore prepared to put up with eccentricity and artistic
temperament. The legend that the Emperor Charles V showed his re-
verence for Titian’s genius by stooping to pick up a brush characterises
the new relationship.

Pope Julius II’s treatment of Michelangelo epitomises the change that
had come about. Julius, the greatest patron of his day, the man who had
gathered round him Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo, in a resolve
to make Rome the artistic centre of the world, was tied by strong bonds
of sympathy to Michelangelo, whose daemonic powers, so similar to
his own, he fully appreciated. Once the pope refused to see the master on
matters concerning the tomb, whereupon Michelangelo wrote: ‘Most
Holy Father: this morning I was driven from your Palace by Your
Holiness’s orders; I give you to understand that from henceforth, if you
desire my services, you must look for me elsewhere than in Rome’ —
and departed for Florence. Julius patiently tried to induce him to return.
‘Michelangelo the sculptor,’ he wrote to the Signoria of Florence, ‘who
left us without reason and in mere caprice is afraid, as we are informed,
of returning; though we for our part are not angry with him, knowing
the humours of such men of genius. ’ This surely was a new language.

No other artist did an equally great service to the profession as a whole.
Michelangelo was the herald of the artists’ ambitions, of their aspira-
tions of autonomy and sovereignty. When he began his career, his family
thought he was stepping down the social ladder. Long before he died, he
was venerated as super-man, as divino. The Portuguese painter Francisco
de Hollanda voiced the change that had come about when he wrote:
‘In Italy one does not care for the renown of great princes; it’s a painter
only that they call divine. ’

2. IN NORTHERN EUROPE

The period between 1490 and 1520 was one of great efflorescence in the
arts of the north, when men like Diirer, Griinewald and Holbein were
active in Germany and the workshops in the Netherlands were still
prolific. It was at this time that artists in these countries became aware
of the Italian Renaissance and also felt the first tremors of the Reformation.

153

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

In the spring of 1494 the young Albrecht Durer was recalled by his
father from the ‘ bachelor journey ’ which had taken him west to some of
the big towns on the Rhine. Obediently, he came home to Niirnberg to
marry and set up his own workshop, but a few months later he left again,
this time, however, going south to Italy. These two journeys are sympto-
matic of the crisis which the artists of the north had to face at the turn
of the century. Durer, bom in 1471 as the son of a goldsmith in whose
workshop he received his first training, had been apprenticed to the
leading Niirnberg painter Michael Wolgemut (1434— 1519). This master,
like most German painters of his generation, had been strongly influenced
by Roger van der Weyden (d. 1464) in whose work traditional Gothic
design and the new delight in depicting the outward appearance of the
world are perfectly merged. During his ‘Wanderjahre’ Durer tried to
meet the painter and engraver Martin Schongauer (14457-91) who was
looked upon almost as a pupil of Roger. But the sudden journey to Italy
speaks of very different interests. During his stay in Basle (about 1491)
Durer had been in close touch with humanists and publishers for whom
he had been working; there he may well have seen Italian books and
engravings. Back in Niirnberg we find him copying Italian engravings with
care and accuracy. In his copies after Mantegna and Pollaiuolo Diirer’s
preoccupation with the beauty and proportion of the human form becomes
at once obvious. It was this interest which drove him to Italy, first in
1494 and again in 1505: he entreated the Italian painter Jacopo di Bar-
bari, who came to Niirnberg probably in 1500, to tell him his ‘secret’ of
figure construction and when the Italian showed himself uncommunicative
he began to study Vitruvius. In 1504 Durer published an engraving,
Adam and Eve , which embodied the first fruits of his researches in pro-
portion ; further investigations were carried out with the help of measured
drawings and resulted finally in two large panel-paintings of the same
subject (1508, Madrid). A little later he tackled the problem once more
in a different way and the famous engraving Knight, Death and Devil was
the result. By now Durer was also preparing a comprehensive treatise
on art, but characteristically he completed no more than the books on
perspective and proportion. At the end of his life he demonstrated his
views again in the Four Apostles (1526, Munich), this time with a
grandeur and conviction that came from life-long study.

Once Durer began to pursue these questions he had to turn to Italian
art for help. Fifteenth-century artists of the north had been well aware
of the world around them, but their pursuit of visual beauty had been
purely empirical. The Italians, having studied nature, applied mathe-
matics to picture-making. Yet these Italian artists meant to do no more
than to return to their own past ; for them the study of ancient monuments,
the study of the rules of Vitruvius and the study of nature were but
facets of one and the same problem. Diirer’s case was different. He never

154

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

went to Rome, or Florence ; he was content to visit Venice, the nearest
centre where artists were practising what he was trying to learn.

By about 1500 most northern artists had to take note of the develop-
ments which had occurred in Italy during the previous seventy years.
Diirer’s journey as a ‘student’ may have been one of the first of its kind,
but soon afterwards such travels were to become more common. The
‘bachelor journey’ which a generation earlier used to take young artists
to the fountain-heads of Flemish realism now took them south. Hans
Burgmair, a painter from Augsburg, visited Venice just before 1500, the
Niimberg sculptor Peter Vischer the Younger went to Italy in 1508 and
Hans Holbein was in Milan in 1518. Even artists from the Low Countries
now went south; Mabuse was in Rome in 1508 and Jan van Scorel must
have been there about 1520.

Yet the purpose of these journeys varied a good deal. Diirer alone
among his German contemporaries seems to have understood one of the
main problems of the Renaissance : Leonardo’s construction of the micro-
cosm by means of number and proportion. Diirer wrote; ‘For truly art
is embedded in nature; he who can pull it out will hold it. If you can get
the better of art, you will not make mistakes in your work. Through
geometry you can prove much of your work.’ 1

His contemporaries received the lessons of the Renaissance on an
altogether lower level. Hans Holbein (1497—1541) certainly had little of
Diirer’s depth or searching mind, but he was perhaps gifted with a much
more immediate artistic perception, which enabled him to weld the ex-
periences of an Italian journey perfectly into his work. For he too grew
up in a late Gothic workshop— that of his father, Holbein the Elder, in
Augsburg — and he too had to come to terms with the new art of Italy.
In Milan he must have seen Leonardo’s Last Supper and the Virgin of
the Rocks; he may have met Luini and he certainly saw something of
Bramante’s early works. Holbein’s facade decorations on the Haus zum
Tanz (1519) and the frescoes in the Town Hall (1522) in Basle are full of
Italian motifs, particularly in their Bramantesque architectural settings.
However, his style cannot be explained by pointing out the borrowing of
motifs; the results of his encounter with Italian art were much more
profound. From his beginnings he made up for a certain lack of imagi-
nation and poetry by an overwhelming sense of reality and scrupulous
matter-of-factness. Contact with Leonardo’s circle can only have helped
to sharpen his eyes. The unsophisticated late Gothic realism became an
unremitting recording of observations controlled by more austere prin-
ciples of form. The great series of portraits with their almost brutal
faithfulness and their simplicity of composition are the outcome of this
intermingling of German and Italian elements.

In Augsburg, an important centre of the arts, we can study yet another
1 E. Panofsky, Albrecht Diirer. 1943, pp. 242 ff., esp. p. 279.

155

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

aspect of the clash between north and south. Augsburg, like Nurnberg,
was a rich commercial city engaged mainly in trade between Germany and
Italy and ties with Venice were particularly close. In fact, the German
merchants had their own settlement in Venice, the fondaco dei Tedeschi.
The Italianate taste of this German colony was so strong that two Italian
masters, Giorgione and his young assistant Titian, were commissioned
in 1508 to decorate the facade of the fondaco, and Durer’s altarpiece
for the German chapel, the Virgin of the Rosaries (1506, Prague) owes
perhaps more to Giovanni Bellini, whom Dtirer greatly admired, than
to northern tradition. It is therefore hardly astonishing that the merchants
of Augsburg wanted from their leading painter, Hans Burgmair (1473—
1531), the kind of painting that was being done for their colleagues in
Venice. In Burgmair’s portraits in particular, but also in his altarpieces,
elements of composition and the rich glow of colour can easily be traced
back to Venetian influence. It was the taste of his patrons which made
the pupil of Schongauer into a follower of the Venetians. The stronger
such external pressure became, the more superficial the reception of the
Italian Renaissance was likely to be.

We can observe this phenomenon in many instances but nowhere more
clearly than in the work of Lucas Cranach (1473-1553), who in some
respects was one of the most important innovators of the age. From
1505 until his death Cranach was employed by successive electors of
Saxony and he had a flourishing workshop in Wittenberg which was
patronised by many German princes. His immense output includes a
number of curious mythological pieces with such subjects as Nymph
by a Spring (Leipzig), Venus and Amor (Rome, Gal. Borghese), and
The Choice of Hercules. All these are subjects in which Renaissance
patrons naturally demanded ‘ classical nudes \ Cranach is true to these
demands of taste even if his figures retain much of Gothic linear flow and
grace and it is not this stylistic peculiarity which makes them look so
unclassical. They are not nude, they are merely undressed. Venus wears
nothing but a large hat, the Graces display shining golden necklaces and
Cupid has draped round his middle a tiny — and transparent — veil. Many
of these pictures still exist in two or more versions for they were choice
collectors’ pieces. This amusing amalgam of Gothic survival and classical
revival is little more than licence made respectable through art.

In the Netherlands artists experienced the same clash of the two tra-
ditions. The power of the school of Roger van der Weyden was ebbing;
Hans Memling, one of his most influential and popular pupils, died in
1494. Gerhard David (c. 1460-1523) and Geertgen tot Sint Jans (working
c. 1490-15 10) continued the tradition of Gothic realism for some time.
Once patrons and artists became aware that this manner was really
outmoded, Durer’s woodcuts and engravings began to exert a considerable
influence, as is most clearly seen in the works of Lucas van Leyden

156

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

(1494-1533). When Dtirer himself visited the Netherlands in 1520 he was
greeted everywhere with the utmost deference and hailed as the greatest
living artist in the north. Direct and important contacts with Italian art
had existed throughout the second half of the fifteenth century, but it
was largely a one-way traffic. The Medici adorned their palace with
Flemish tapestries, Tommaso Portinari commissioned an altarpiece from
Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine church, yet Dutch and Flemish
artists were hardly shaken in their own traditions by such works of their
Italian contemporaries as they saw. The paintings of Roger van der
Weyden hardly reveal that he undertook a journey to Italy in about 1450.
The work of an artist living some fifty years later usually betrays at once
whether he has been to Italy, even without supporting documentary
evidence. Mabuse is perhaps the most characteristic example of a painter
whose style was shaped by his experience of Italian and classical art.
Here the classical tradition which we saw so curiously distorted in Cra-
nach’s painting flows much more purely. The study of Diirer must have
played an important part in Mabuse’s training, though the characteristic
style for which his contemporaries esteemed him was acquired only
through his sojourn in Rome in 1508 which was suggested by his patron,
the highly cultured Philip of Burgundy. In 1484 a Bruges publisher had
brought out an edition of the medieval allegorised version of Ovid’s Meta-
morphoses, the O vide Moralise. It is illustrated with a number of woodcuts
showing the heroes of classical antiquity in heavy medieval armour and
the nymphs and goddesses dressed like ladies of the day. Some twenty
years later Mabuse painted Neptune and Amphitrite (1516, Berlin) for
his patron. The two life-size nudes owe their existence first and foremost
to a close study of classical statues and reliefs; equally the setting, an
enormous aedicula, is purely classical in character. Vasari tells us that
Mabuse was the first artist to introduce mythological subjects, properly
treated, into Flanders. 1 Even in the north these legends had never been
quite forgotten and the Italian Renaissance now helped artists and
patrons to reintegrate once more form and content. In this ‘revival’ we
can again discern a strong sociological impetus, for it was the kind of art
demanded by a well-educated elite.

For Diirer the problem of the classical revival was quite different. In
his youth, he was attracted by strange mythological subjects, such as the
Rape of Europa, the Sea Monster, Hercules or the Dream of a Scholar into
which he introduced a nude classical Venus. But with growing maturity
and self-assurance it became a certainty to Diirer that he could best
express his ideal of beauty through works of a religious, specifically
Christian character. At times of great mental stress, as in the years
preceding the Reformation, he occasionally returned to what were for
him dark pagan powers ( Abduction on a Unicorn, 1516), but if we take
1 Vasari (ed. G. Milanesi), vol. vn, p. 584.

13 157 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Diirer’s work as a whole the absence of any mythological subjects after
his second Italian journey of 1505-6 is remarkable and hardly fortuitous.
Durer himself makes it quite clear in his theoretical writings that religious
art must take precedence over all other art. The search for laws of beauty
is valid only within limits. Durer was at one and the same time a painter
and engraver of traditional religious subjects, and the first German artist
to outgrow the modes of late Gothic art.

France remained relatively free from Italian Renaissance influence
until the advent of Francis I in 1515. The Maitre de Moulins, so called
after his most important work, an altarpiece in the cathedral of Moulins,
is a typical artist in the conventional Gothic style; ‘clarity, limpidity,
dignity ’ are the chief characteristics of his art. 1 Jean Perreal (c. 1455-1530)
accompanied Louis XII to Italy, but remained nevertheless true to tra-
dition, as his portrait of the king (Windsor) shows. At most one may see
weak reflections of Milanese painting in some of his works. Bourdichon
(c. 1457-1521) seems to have come under the influence of Perugino. But
on the whole French painting was remarkably stagnant at the end of the
fifteenth century. 2

German sculptors show awareness of the same problems which beset
the painters, though to a lesser extent. Tilman Riemenschneider (1468-
1531), working mainly in the Rhine-Main region, successfully continued
the tradition of Gothic sculpture. The anatomy of the human figure,
whether draped or not, is never taken too seriously, the stance is un-
certain and heads are rarely expressive of true emotion. But the outline of
figures is always lively and draperies and hair are arranged to give the
maximum effect to the play of light and shade. The charming figures of
Adam and Eve (Wurzburg) are good examples of his rather delicate art.

Veit Stoss’s monumental altarpiece of 1493 (Cracow cathedral) also
remains wholly within the Gothic tradition. Here Flemish realism, a
treatment of draperies derived from German sculpture and a marked in-
terest in expressive gestures and heads combine to create a personal and
highly dramatic style quite uninhibited by any Renaissance rules and
restraints. Stoss’s other works, most of them in and around Niimberg,
where he had his workshop, show similar characteristics.

It is once again in Niirnberg and Augsburg that we find workshops
catering for an Italianate taste. The workshop of Peter Vischer (the Elder,
c. 1455-1529) experienced the full impact of the Italian Renaissance,
since two of his sons, Peter (the Younger, 1487-1528) and Hans (c. 1490-
1549) spent some time in Italy. The most important work of the family
foundry, the monumental tabernacle over the relics of St Sebaldus
(1508-17, Niirnberg, Sebalduskirche) is still Gothic in general conception
and follows a traditional shape. It is, however, decorated with over one

1 G. Ring, A Century of French Painting, 1400-1500 (1949).
a A. F. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700 (1953), p. 18.

158

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

hundred statuettes many of which clearly betray Italian models. What
could be a better illustration of this odd mixture of heterogeneous styles
than the appearance of nymphs, tritons and satyrs of truly classical shape
at the foot of a Gothic shrine? The Augsburg sculptor Adolf Daucher
(c. 1465-1524) decorated a tomb for a member of the Fugger family with
mourning satyrs and putti riding on dolphins, which may have been
derived from Venetian models.

There was at the time little activity in church building, resulting in a
dearth of monumental commissions, and the Reformation was soon to
make all but an end of carved altar shrines. Lavish tombs, however, were
constantly commissioned in a period so preoccupied with thoughts of
death and disaster, and Renaissance ornament plays an ever greater part
in their decoration. Fountains too were sometimes fashioned in the new
style; in 1532 Hans Vischer placed a figure of Apollo on top of a fountain
in the courtyard of Niirnberg Town Hall. In this case the design may have
been inspired by the famous Belvedere Apollo in Rome. But the sculptors
devoted most of their energy to the creation of small decorative works
and collectors’ pieces. These had to conform to contemporary taste since
they were produced for wealthy and educated patrons, who had usually
been to Italy themselves, and Renaissance sculpture became known in
Germany mainly through such small figures.

Not only classical mythology was treated in the new manner. When
Conrad Meit of Worms (c. 1475-c. 1550), who for many years was em-
ployed by Margaret of Austria, made a little alabaster statuette of Judith
(Munich, Bayrisches National-Museum) he showed her completely nude,
modelled like a classical Venus and imbued with a strong sensuality.
Hans Daucher (c. 1485-1538) placed a Virgin with Child and angels,
conceived in a purely Gothic fashion, into an airy Bramantesque hall
which would pass muster in the eye of the most critical Italian (relief,
dated 1518, Vienna).

The same transitional style is also to be found in French sculpture of
this period. Michel Colombe’s tomb of' Francis II, duke of Brittany,
(Nantes cathedral, 1502-7) is the most characteristic example. The recum-
bent effigy and the little angels kneeling by the head are traditional, but
the decorative details, particularly the scallop-shells and the allegorical
figures at the four corners of the tomb, tell a different story. In France,
unlike Germany, there are a number of Italian sculptors active throughout
this period. While the tomb of Charles VIII by the Lombard sculptor
Mazzoni has not survived, that of Louis XII (1516-1531, Saint-Denis) by
a member of the Giusti family, which settled in Tours and called itself
Juste, shows what was fashionable in France. The individual forms are
Italian but the tomb is still Gothic in type.

In the Netherlands the influence of the Italian Renaissance on sculpture
can scarcely be discovered until the late 1520’s and there is no really

159 13 *

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

important example before the richly decorated carved mantelpiece by
Lancelot Blondel in the Palace of Justice at Bruges (1529-31).

Architecture in northern Europe was hardly affected by what had
happened in Italy during the fifteenth century. The architect even more
than the painter or sculptor depended on pattern books and theoretical
treatises when he wished to absorb a new style, and nothing of the kind
existed as yet. Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria was published in 1485, but
it is obvious that after reading this unillustrated text no architect could
possibly have constructed any building even vaguely resembling the
Palazzo Rucellai. Furthermore, work on some of the great cathedrals,
such as Ulm, Cologne and Tours, was still in progress and the masons’
lodges with their strict traditions were still the nurseries for young archi-
tects. If masons did go to Italy, they went not as students of the art of
Brunelleschi or Bramante, but to work on the great Gothic structures of
S. Petronio in Bologna or Milan cathedral. It is for these reasons that
the Gothic tradition survived longest in architecture. The Annenkirche
in Annaberg (Saxony), begun in 1499, and the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle,
begun in 1518, are Gothic hall-type churches, but the ribs under the vault
no longer have any functional character and the octagonal piers with their
concave sides seem curiously unrelated to the vault. Gothic forms were
still in use, but the logic which had pervaded the whole of the great Gothic
cathedral now seems lost. The same holds true to a lesser degree for
France, where the flamboyant style remained sufficiently vigorous to
produce the richly decorated screen masking the fourteenth-century facade
of Rouen cathedral or the facade of Troyes cathedral designed by Martin
Chambiges in 1507. In fact, Charles VIII’s Italian enterprise of 1494
seems to have been as little influential in the arts as it was in the
realm of politics. Fra Giocondo and Giuliano da San Gallo, both of
whom were in France for a while after 1495, have left no traceable works,
and the wing of Blois castle built during the reign of Louis XII shows no
Italian influence at all. Not until Francis I came to the throne was a
strongly italianising court style created. The wing which he added to
Blois castle, while Gothic in structure, displays many Renaissance
decorations not unnaturally derived from Milanese architecture. Even
Chambord, begun in 1519, is still an intriguing mixture of styles. Certain
of Leonardo’s designs, made whilst he was living in France (1516-19)
were to influence palace architecture. However, most of the buildings
which showed marked Italian influence fall outside the period under
discussion.

During the first two decades of the sixteenth century architects as a rule
were content to borrow decorative motifs from the south and put a
thin Renaissance veneer over an essentially Gothic structure. The palace
which was built for Margaret of Austria at Malines between 1507 and
1526 (now the Palais de Justice) is a typical example. The main door

160

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

is decorated in Renaissance fashion, the windows are crowned with
segmental arches, but the steep roof remains Gothic.

This hybrid style also prevailed in Germany. Once more the best early
examples are in Augsburg. The rich Fuggers, protagonists of the Italian
Renaissance, employed Italian workmen for the building of a chapel in
the church of St Anne (1509-18) and tried to give their town house (1512—
15) the appearance of an Italian palazzo. The most characteristic product
of a mixture of forms and styles in the north is the model of the church
Zur schonen Maria in Regensburg (1519). Here an almost correct Italian
centralised ground plan is combined with a nave and a late Gothic elevation.

The patronage of the time clearly mirrors this uncomfortable transi-
tional stage. Enough has been said of the role of the French kings to
make this plain. Two typical German examples may be discussed here.
The Emperor Maximilian (1493-15 19) appears as an embodiment both of
the medieval and of the renaissance spirit. The ‘last knight’, who himself
was the author of a traditional romance, Der Weisskunig, who loved
jousts and tournaments, who put King Arthur among his ancestry, also
liked to see himself as a true Roman emperor riding in triumph under an
arch commemorating his great deeds; he surrounded himself with scholars
and humanists and took part in their antiquarian and literary studies;
he liked personally to supervise the designs of artists working for him.
Yet it was all only a paper dream. The triumphal arch was never actually
built, but like the procession remained only a series of woodcuts designed
by a great number of German artists of whom Diirer was the most promi-
nent. In these woodcuts the two worlds once more meet. The wisdom of
the ancients, culled from the pages of Horus Apollo’s Hieroglyphica, first
printed in 1505, intermingles with motives from medieval bestiaries and
Italian putti ride alongside the German Landsknecht. The Triumphal
Arch uses Italian decorative elements applied to a quite unclassical
Gothic structure. But the oddest of Maximilian’s enterprises is perhaps
the tomb he planned for himself at Innsbruck (from 1502 onwards)
which, like so many of his undertakings, was never finished. The best
German sculptors were called in, among them Veit Stoss and Peter Vischer
the Elder. The central feature was to be the bronze figure of the emperor
kneeling on a sarcophagus and he was to be surrounded by some 140
statues and statuettes representing his ancestors, his prominent courtiers,
the subjugated provinces and so forth. Michelangelo’s tomb for Julius II
comes to mind, but we immediately realise the enormous difference
between the two schemes. Michelangelo strove hard to maintain the
formal unity of his monument and, moreover, every detail is subservient
to a general philosophical concept (p. 134). Maximilian’s tomb might at
best have been a conglomeration of good statues, since the iconographic
programme is lacking in unity. Pride, a craving for eternal glory, the
unique position of the emperor, all these worldly ambitions may be read

161

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

from this tomb. Like any Italian of his age Maximilian wanted to be
worthily commemorated ; he wished for a visible symbol of survival, but
he remained a knight in medieval armour like his ancestors who surround
his effigy.

If Maximilian cast himself in the role of a Roman emperor, Cardinal
Albrecht of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz, Magdeburg and Halber-
stadt attempted to emulate contemporary Italian princes. He was both
a leading ecclesiastic and a territorial ruler, besides being one of the
electors. He was ruthless, vainglorious and yet a highly educated man
of taste. He imitated Italian patronage of the arts on a grand scale and
Diirer, Griinewald, Cranach and many others were called upon to work
for him . Griinewald, in fact, held an official position at his court for
many years. When he painted the cardinal as Saint Erasmus (c. 1518,
Munich) the fashionable classical form of allegorical portraiture must
have been suggested by the patron, but in composition and design the
picture remained unmistakably northern.

German historians have often tended to deplore the clash between
north and south as a kind of calamity for German art which, they claim,
fell victim to a foreign invasion. This is not the place to rebut such a
nationalistic theory. Two factors, however, should be borne in mind. It
will have become evident that by the end of the fifteenth century Gothic
art was showing signs' of exhaustion. What had been a style was by now
in danger of becoming a mannerism. Furthermore, the ‘ Renaissance’ was
a European and not a limited Italian movement, even if the beginnings
were to be found in Italy. Jacob Burckhardt, in a celebrated passage, has
spoken of the ‘discovery of the world and of man’ as the chief charac-
teristics of the movement. Though we tend to modify this claim today,
it remains fundamentally true. If in Italy the ‘discovery of the world’
culminated in the all-embracing work of Leonardo, in Germany, or to be
precise in Austria, it found artistic expression in pure landscape painting.
Even the Greeks, with all their awareness of natural beauty, had never
treated landscape as a subject in its own right. In the Middle Ages
landscape elements were no more than symbolic props in religious narra-
tives. Not until the late Middle Ages was exact observation applied,
for instance, to render correctly plants in herbals. Flemish artists of the
fifteenth century and their German followers had given much attention
— and space — to landscape, though it was never more than a distant
background. When Lucas Cranach, while working in Vienna, painted a
Crucifixion (1503, Munich) he showed no unusual interest in nature, but
he introduced in his composition two innovations of the utmost conse-
quence: the whole scenery is rendered with the greatest possible geological
and botanical accuracy and at the same time the viewpoint is taken so
low that we seem to be looking into these forest glades and meadows and
are thus drawn right into the landscape. Also the landscape element

162

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

began to grow in proportion to the whole picture. In the Rest on the
Flight into Egypt (1504, Berlin) the setting appears to be as important as
the Holy Family. Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1475-1538), who may have met
Cranach personally, was certainly fully acquainted with these innovations
and carried them yet a step further. His St George and the Dragon (1510,
Munich) is really a landscape with figures. Moreover, it seems that
Altdorfer was the first European artist to paint landscapes without figures
(c. 1532, Munich), and there are pure landscapes among his drawings and
etchings. Wolf Huber (c. 1490-1553) continued in this manner, probably
after personal contact with Altdorfer.

The three artists just discussed, together with some minor painters, are
sometimes referred to as the ‘Danube School’, though there was no
school in the accepted sense of the word, nor were the landscapes of this
group unique. Dtirer on his two journeys to Italy produced some of his
finest and most delicate water-colours of alpine scenery and even later he
occasionally worked in this genre. In the beginning this new branch of
painting seems to have been appreciated by artists and connoisseurs only.
Durer regarded his water-colours as mere sketches; drawing, etching
and water-colour were the media employed and the few extant paintings
are on a small scale. Being painted on vellum they can hardly be called
easel paintings, but retain the character of miniatures. Whatever the
medium, all these works share a deep feeling for the poetry and beauty
of nature, at times expressing a kind of awe for the strange vastness of the
world as is the case in some of the late drawings by Altdorfer.

This feeling for nature also pervades the religious paintings of the same
master. In his great altarpiece of St Florian ( 1 5 1 8) the stories of St Sebas-
tian are in landscapes which enhance emotional participation, most
moving in the scene of the finding of the Saint’s body by the banks of a
river depicted in eerie twilight.

The intensity of religious feeling expressed in this way is characteristic
of much that was done by German artists before and during the Refor-
mation. In the course of the fifteenth century German and Flemish artists
had fashioned one particular tool for religious imagery which was to be
of material assistance to the reformers : the print. By refining the tech-
niques of both woodcut and engraving Dtirer produced works in these
media unrivalled in Europe, and even Italian artists pirated his prints.
Durer’s Life of the Virgin, his several series of the Passion, his innumerable
individual prints, the prints of his school at Niirnberg, those of Pencz,
the Beham brothers, Hans Baldung Grien and many others, all testify to
the productivity and virility of this branch of art. In his lifetime Durer
seems to have been esteemed even more for his graphic work than for
his paintings and even after his death Erasmus spoke of him in elegant
humanistic style as the ‘Apelles of black lines’. 1

1 E. Panofsky, Jour. Warburg and Courtauld Inst, xtv (1951), pp. 34S.

163

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Hans Holbein's Dance of Death , designed 1523-6 but published in
1538, and Diirer’s Apocalypse of 1498 remind us of the more sombre side
of religious meditation during the period under discussion. The haunting
fear of the millennium and the morbid preoccupation with torment and
suffering are predominant in the work of two of the greatest painters of
the period, Bosch and Grunewald. Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516)
still belongs to the fifteenth-century tradition of his native Holland, but
with the help of a late Gothic vocabulary he developed an imagery which
is as yet largely unexplained. A recent attempt to make Bosch into the
painter of an abstruse Adamite sect is unconvincing. 1 The horrifying
fabulous monster threatening St Anthony (Madrid) and the appallingly
cruel representations of Hell, which Bosch liked to paint again and again,
are part of the mental pattern of the age. These horrors are all the more
frightening since Bosch skilfully and paradoxically applied the utmost
realism to their representation.

Matthias Grunewald (c. 1480-1529), whose real name was Mathis
Nithart Gotthart, gave tangible expression to the religious intensity of
late medieval mysticism. He fashioned his powerful religious imagery out
of German tradition, admitting Italian Renaissance elements only to a
limited degree. His greatest work, an altarpiece executed for the Antonite
House of Isenheim (completed c. 1512, now in Colmar Museum) is one
of the most monumental of all Gothic altarpieces. It consists of a shrine
with carved figures by Niclas Hagenauer and two pairs of movable
painted wings. The panel with the Temptation of St Anthony has a night-
marish quality of unequalled power and a spirit akin to the most frightening
works of Bosch. The Crucifixion is no longer a tableau vivant in a religious
drama, as artists of the fifteenth century had frequently painted it. By
bringing together the Lamb and the Baptist under the Cross he stressed
the symbolic meaning of the sacrifice. The visionary intensity with which
the suffering of Christ is rendered invites the beholder to that imitatio
Christi which inspired much of the religious thought of the age.

Here we can sense the same religious troubles which are mirrored in
Diirer’s works and discussed in his letters. 2 The way in which both Diirer
and Grunewald reacted to Luther’s writings has an importance far beyond
their individual experiences. Grunewald seems to have become deeply
involved in the religious and social upheavals which accompanied the
Reformation and it seems that he took an active part in the Peasants’
Revolt. In any case he must have ceased painting in the early 1520’s and
thereafter he made a living by such menial work as soap-boiling. There was
no longer room for his deeply mystical approach to art. Diirer, on the
other hand, had found a new language through the study of Italian art ;
on his own testimony, he was greatly helped in his torment by the writings

1 W. Fraenger, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch (1952).

* H. Rupprich, Diirer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 1 (1956), pp. 85 ff.

164

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

of Luther. Soon after 1520 Protestant imagery appears in his woodcuts
and he abandoned a large altarpiece of which the central panel was to
represent the Virgin and Child to devote all his energies to his ‘Bekennt-
nisbild’, the Four Apostles (1526, Munich), which as a significant gesture
he gave to his native Ntimberg in 1526. This was not just the act of a
self-conscious artist, eager to perpetuate his fame, it was even more the
act of a modern artist conscious of his responsibility. All that Diirer had
ever pondered and studied was now brought into play to paint four
preachers of true Christianity, warning his fellow human beings less against
the failings of Rome than against the excesses of over-zealous reformers.
Here indeed was an attempt to find a new dynamic mean between old and
new, both in art and religion. Many of the German artists provided
Luther with powerful pictorial weapons in his fight, but it was given to
Diirer alone to find a perfect fusion between Renaissance and Reformation,
the two great forces which overshadowed artistic creation in the north
about 1520.

3. IN SPAIN

One of the many fruits of national activity in Spain during the age of
Ferdinand and Isabella was a new and widespread stimulus to the arts.
If by European standards Spanish art of the period under consideration
was only of minor importance, it was in many respects distinctive in
character and it was to have a far-reaching effect in Spain’s possessions
in the New World. Whilst artistic production was still largely religious in
purpose, royal patronage now played a major role in fostering it. Isabella
herself built and endowed monasteries, churches and public institutions;
the yoke and arrows, emblem of the Catholic sovereigns, and their escut-
cheon appear as decorative motifs on her buildings as they do in the
margins of her manuscripts. Moreover, by adorning her residences with
tapestries and paintings, mostly acquired from abroad, Isabella laid the
foundations of the Spanish royal collection. The other chief patrons of
art were the nobles and rich and powerful prelates, such as the Mendozas,
Fonseca and Jimenez, who built palaces, chapels, hospitals and universities
and followed the royal fashion for having themselves commemorated by
monumental tombs. Newly acquired wealth and power nourished a taste
for lavish decoration, inspired by the example of the Moors, in which the
minor arts — woodwork, goldsmith’s work, ironwork, etc. — played an
important part.

Until the end of the fifteenth century Spanish art continued to be
governed by northern influence which survived, moreover, well into the
sixteenth century, when the style chosen for the cathedrals of Salamanca
and Segovia was still pure Gothic. Echoes of the Italian Quattrocento
first appeared in painting and sculpture during the last quarter of the

165

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

fifteenth century, but they were confined for the most part to architectural
features and ornamental details, which modified rather than transformed
the prevailing Hispano-Flemish and Gothic styles. A long-standing
liking for northern art and an innate taste for Mudejar (the art of sub-
ject Muhammadans, which still survived in architecture and the minor arts)
made Spain slow to adopt the innovations of the Italian Renaissance.
Furthermore, pagan subjects, though familiar in literature, had little appeal
for patrons who were the militant champions of Christianity dedicating
their achievements to the Church. Painting was confined almost exclusively
to altarpieces and easel paintings of religious subjects; fresco paintings
and even portraits were rare. Sculpture was devoted chiefly to altarpieces,
sepulchral monuments and architectural decoration and there was little
demand for portrait busts, civic monuments or any other kind of free-
standing statuary.

Despite a close dependence on foreign models and the intervention of
many foreign artists, in one particular field, that of architectural sculpture,
Spanish art developed a peculiar character of its own. Thus the Spanish
version of Flamboyant Gothic, which flourished during the reign of the
queen, has been termed Isabelline; and the following phase, marked by
the introduction of Italian influence, is also denoted by a special term,
Plateresque, a term derived from plateria (silverwork) and coined in the
seventeenth century in criticism of artists who violated the rules of Roman
(Renaissance) architecture with ‘plateresque fantasies’. 1 The chief and
common features of Isabelline and Plateresque, a profusion of ornament
in low relief covering large surfaces and the screen-like application of this
ornament, with little regard for the underlying structure, »re strongly
reminiscent of Moorish art. The repetition and mixture of motifs, which
range from conventional Gothic or Renaissance forms to emblems,
heraldry, inscriptions and arabesques, produce an effect that is invariably
extravagant, often bizarre and exotic. The close association of archi-
tecture and sculpture (many artists followed both professions) makes the
terms Isabelline and Plateresque applicable to altarpieces and sepulchral
monuments as well as to the decoration of architecture proper — walls,
doorways, arches, windows, etc. Whilst the sculptured fagades of S.
Gregorio and S. Pablo in Valladolid look like enlarged stone retables,
the enormous polychrome altarpieces of Gil de Siloe and his followers
almost fill the apses that they adorn ; both free-standing tombs and wall-
tombs are similarly elaborate in structure and monumental in scale.

The monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, Toledo, begun by order of
Ferdinand and Isabella in 1476 to commemorate their victory over the
Portuguese at Toro, is one of the first and most characteristic examples of
the Isabelline style, although Juan Guas, the sculptor-architect who
designed it, was probably of French origin. The inside of the Gothic

1 Cf. D. Ortiz de Zuniga, Anales eclesiasticos (Madrid, 1677), p. 546.

166

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

church, originally intended for the burial-place of the king and queen, is
covered with decorative carvings — figures, ornament, a frieze of inscrip-
tions in large Gothic letters — the whole dominated by the huge motif of
the royal escutcheon, accompanied by the yoke and arrows, repeated
round the transept.

The sculptured decoration of portals and tympana, which survived in
ecclesiastical architecture from medieval times and became the main
feature of Isabelline and Plateresque facades, was now extended to do-
mestic architecture, where decoration was for the first time lavished on
the exterior as well as the interior. Windows, galleries, cornices, balus-
trades, and the arcades of the patio — the inner court, characteristic of
Spanish houses since the Middle Ages — were also richly carved. Facades
were often studded with faceted stones, and that of the Casa de las
Conchas, Salamanca, is covered with scallop shells, referring to the owner’s
title of Knight of Santiago. Profusion and complexity of ornament made
the Infantado Palace, Guadalajara, built by Juan Guas and assistants
(1480-92, largely destroyed 1936), the most sumptuous example of a
nobleman’s house. An arcaded gallery, stalactite comice and the Mendoza
escutcheon supported by ‘wild men’ contributed to the adornment of the
facade; in the patio Tuscan columns supported trefoil arches with spandrils
filled with heraldic animals, shields and scrolls; and the ceilings were of
elaborate Mudejar construction.

The infiltration of Italian influence at the end of the fifteenth century
did not restrain the taste for ostentation shown by the victors over
Muhammadanism and the discoverers of the New World; it provided the
artist with a further repertoire of decorative motifs. There was, too, no
hesitation in mixing the new style, called ‘obra a la antigua’, with ‘obra
moderna ’ or Gothic, nor did they follow any clear chronological sequence.
Enrique de Egas who, after the fall of Granada, built the Royal Chapel
there in Gothic style (1506) was also the foremost exponent of early
Plateresque. The Royal Hospice for Pilgrims, Santiago (begun 1501),
which he built for Ferdinand and Isabella and the Hospital de Santa Cruz,
Toledo (begun 1504), designed by him for Cardinal Mendoza, have
typical Plateresque portals in which Italian ornamental motifs predomi-
nate, though mixed with Gothic forms. Renaissance ornament was also
frequently blended with Mudejar, as in the painted stucco decoration of
the entrance to the Chapel of the Annunciation in Siguenza cathedral
(1510). The portal of Salamanca University (completed 1529), where the
arms of the Emperor Charles V appear beside those of Ferdinand and
Isabella, is thoroughly Italianate in detail, with portrait medallions and
copies of antique statues; but it is still confined in a Gothic frame and
applied like a screen to the facade. Plateresque, as a style of decoration,
whether composed of Italian and Gothic, Italian and Mudejar, or purely
Italian features, continued to be applied to both Gothic and Renaissance

167

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

buildings throughout the reign of Charles V; and many of its features
found an echo in the Baroque age.

The first wave of Italian influence that inspired Plateresque decoration
was stimulated by the importation of sculpture and by the arrival of
Italian artists in Spain. Felipe Vigamy (de Borgona), a Frenchman who
was in Burgos by 1498, also did much to spread the new style, particularly
through his adaptations of Renaissance design to the traditional Spanish
polychrome altarpiece ; and his activities extended from Burgos to Granada.
But the chief source of Italian influence in the first quarter of the sixteenth
century was the new fashion for commissioning sepulchral monuments
in Italy ; and the most important Italian artist to visit Spain was the Floren-
tine Domenico Fancelli, who went to Seville in 1510 to set up the tomb
of Archbishop Mendoza, which he had carved in Genoa. This led to a
series of royal commissions including the tomb of the Infante Juan in
S. Tomas, Avila (1513) and the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella themselves
in the Royal Chapel, Granada (1518); all three inspired by Pollaiuolo’s
tomb of Sixtus IV in St Peter’s and in accordance with the tradition for
free-standing tombs which was still popular in Spain. As in the case of
architecture, Italian influence on monumental sculpture was at first
confined to ornamental detail and it was not until after Fancelli’s death
(1519) that it really bore fruit. When Renaissance forms finally ousted
Gothic survivals this was largely due to a new generation of artists like
Ordonez, Machuca, Alonso Berruguete and Diego de Siloe — the four
Spaniards named by Francisco de Holanda, the Portuguese enthusiast of
Italy and the antique, in his list of ‘eagles’ or famous modern artists
(1548); they were trained in Italy and took back to Spain the mature
fashions of the High Renaissance. It was not until 1526 that the first
classical building in Spain, Machuca’s unfinished palace of Charles V in
Granada, was begun and the first work on classical art to be published
there, Diego de Sagredo’s Medidas del Romano, based on Vitruvius,
appeared in Toledo in the same year.

In painting as in architecture and sculpture the taste for northern art
lasted well into the sixteenth century and Queen Isabella’s patronage did
much to perpetuate it. The inventories of her collection of over two hun-
dred paintings and the work that she bequeathed to the Royal Chapel,
Granada, show her predilection for Netherlandish artists : van der Weyden,
Memling, Bosch, David. She also employed several northerners as court
painters — Melchior Aleman, Michel Sittow, Juan de Flandes — though
her chief painter was Francisco Chacon of Toledo, who also held the
office of censor, whose duty it was to prevent any Jew or Moor from daring
to paint the forms of Christ, the Virgin or any of the Saints. But Isabella
also possessed some Italian paintings, including a Botticelli and a Peru-
gino (?), and some of the Flemish artists that she favoured had had contact
with Italy. Thus, whilst the Hispano-Flemish style flourished at the court

168

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

and with artists like Gallegos in Castile and Bermejo in Aragon, Italian
elements were beginning to make their appearance in much the same way
as they did in the plastic arts and as they did in many Flemish paintings
of the period ; they were due as much to the influence of these paintings as
to direct influence from Italy.

Pedro Berruguete, one of the few Spanish artists to visit Italy in the
fifteenth century, was in Urbino in 1477 with Melozzo da Forli and
Justus of Ghent. He returned to Spain with a taste for narrative, realistic
detail and Renaissance ornament and with a knowledge of perspective.
But as he worked chiefly on small panels for the large altarpieces that were
popular in Spain, his style comes closer to that of Italianising Flemings
than to that of any Italian artist. In Andalusia, Alejo Fernandez (d. 1543)
was the chief artist to combine Italian and Flemish influences and, more
than any other Spanish painter of his time, his idealised types recall those
of older Italian contemporaries, such as Pinturicchio. But what gives
the works of even the more Italianate artists like Berruguete and Alejo
Fernandez a peculiarly Spanish character is the archaistic use of gold and
patterned background and costume.

The first direct influence of the Italian High Renaissance on painting
came in Valencia, the birthplace of Pope Alexander VI, and the city
that had the closest cultural ties with Italy. As early as 1472 the future
pope, as cardinal, had brought three artists there from Italy, one of them
Paolo da San Leocadio from Reggio, who painted frescoes in the cathedral.
Local artists, like Rodrigo de Osona, father and son, soon began to
introduce Italian architecture and ornament into their Flemish-style
compositions. In 1507-10 Fernando Yanez and Fernando Llanos, one
of whom had assisted Leonardo in the hall of the great council in
Florence, implanted his influence in Valencia with their paintings for the
retable in the cathedral. Some years later Vicente Juan Masip became the
founder of a school, based on sixteenth-century Italian painting, which was
continued by his son Juan de Juanes and survived until the end of the
century. But it was decidedly provincial; for nowhere in Spain did Italian
influence inspire a distinctive style of painting, even to the extent that
earlier Flemish influence had ; and though Charles V’s patronage of Titian
was important for the development of court portraiture, it was not until
the seventeenth century that a truly national school of painting emerged.

4. VERNACULAR LITERATURE IN WESTERN EUROPE, I493-I52O

The end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth saw
Europe at a crossroads, cultural as well as political and religious. The
medieval traditions were failing, though not yet dead, and for many
years ‘ modern ’ literature was still to feel influences which had informed
the writings of the Middle Ages. The most striking of these were the

169

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

spirit of free and often licentious realism embodied in fabliau, novella or
farce, a realism which in one or other of its many forms was to enliven the
work of a Machiavelli, a Folengo, a Rabelais and a Cervantes ; the spirit
of chivalry, courtesy and gallantry which, although chivalry itself was
dying or dead, continued to find an increasingly artificial expression in
lyric and romance until it was given new life by the influx of Platonic
notions; and the moralising spirit with its inescapable concomitants of
allegory and symbol. But other phenomena which were appearing in
different parts of Europe deserve notice. Not unconnected, at any rate
as a parallel mental tendency, with the decline of the scholastic philosophy
into formalism was the reduction of poetry to conformity with highly
complex rules. In some countries poetry was frankly regarded as a
‘ second rhetoric ’ and hence subject to similar rules ; the ideal became the
skilful and ingenious manipulation of words to fit a complicated structure
of phrase, metre and rhyme which all but killed poetry. This formalism
was to be seen not only in the lesser Petrarchans of Italy, the Grands
Rhetoriqueurs of France and the Netherlandish Rederijkers, but also in
the decaying Minnesang and the developing Meistergesang of Germany
and the bardic developments of later fifteenth-century Wales. This
regrettable development had, however, its more honourable origins in the
growth, in the last two centuries, of a spirit of individual craftsmanship
which, while it reduced the number of anonymous works devoted to the
greater glory of God and increased the proportion of signed works to the
greater glory of the author, imbued the artist with the desire to perfect
his work according to his lights and the fashions of the time. So the
writer placed technique above matter and above emotive intensity. At the
same time the objective, and so the matter, of writing might be narrowed.
The Middle Ages had been interested, in their own way, in great general
matters: Christianity and Christendom, the virtues and vices of man,
man’s relation to God ; these had found expression in works which, while
perhaps particular in manner, were nevertheless of universal application,
as the wide diffusion of the Charlemagne and Arthurian matters showed.
Now, however, the growth of writing as a means of livelihood brought
with it the need of patronage and reward, to be sought if possible in
kingly or princely courts, if not, in the houses of the local nobility or
wealthy bourgeoisie. On the humblest level this might lead to purely
local literature ; on the higher to ‘ national ’ literature, whether the nation
was the city-state or the expanding royal realm. The movement coincided
in time with that very development in political history which forced upon
the attention of writer and patron alike the nature and claims of the
‘nation’ as a separate and easily identifiable unit having its own interests
and no longer merely a part of a greater European community. Yet a
Leonardo or an Erasmus was constantly crossing these boundaries which
the latter, at all events, could see solidifying around him.

170

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

The name of Erasmus brings us to a consideration of the highest im-
portance: the co-existence and cross-fertilisation at this time of vernacular
literatures and of a flourishing and renovated Latin literature, of the more
significance in that it was still thought necessary to write serious works in
that language. Except in its most popular kinds, vernacular literature was
more and more influenced by neo-Latin, so that any strict dichotomy
between the two is, in the last resort, artificial. The influence of Erasmus’s
Adages on literature generally, the impact of neo-Latin plays on the de-
velopment of the new ‘regular’ theatres in the vulgar tongue are but two
instances of a complex revitalising of vernacular literature by classical
antiquity through the writings of the humanists. Many authors, it must
be remembered, wrote both in Latin and in their native idiom. Inevitably
the question arose: could not the vernaculars take the place of Latin even
in learned works? It was no new problem in Italy, but at this time it
became acute once more and in other countries it was destined, at a
somewhat later date, to be diligently studied and argued. To these con-
siderations add the new attitude to ancient letters fostered by the Italians
and the humanists in general, the study of Latin and Greek authors not
merely for their content (often a misunderstood or invented ‘moral’
content) but also for their aesthetic merit and the adaptation of their
formal beauty to the matter expressed; the juxtaposition of classical
mythology with Christian matter and even the substitution of the former
for the latter; the revelation not only of a ‘new’ antiquity but also of a
whole New World ; and the development of printing which speeded and
consolidated the diffusion of these elements. Such factors, in varying
degree, affected all the important vernacular literatures of Europe.

The political disunity of Italy was reflected in the localisation of literary
and artistic activity around a number of centres: the Papacy, the princi-
palities or republics of Florence, Ferrara, Venice, Urbino or Mantua.
The use of mercenary troops liberated the citizens for the acquisition of
wealth and influence or for the pursuit of arts and letters ; the potentates
themselves indulged in literary creation and felt their glory real when it
was reflected in the magnificence of their courts and the number of their
literary hangers-on, but if there were scores of scribbling parasites there
were also serious thinkers and superior writers. The strange thing is that,
though the political chaos attracted the vultures, the invasion of Italy by
Charles VIII of France and all the marchings and countermarchings that
ensued left the Italian states relatively prosperous, their writers productive.
Most Italian centres had their academies, which, though originally de-
voted in the main to the fostering of the classical humanities, encouraged
— albeit indirectly — the development of vernacular literature.

To attempt to describe the varied literature of Italy in these decades
within the framework of these local centres would be to destroy the unity

171

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

of the impact which it had upon succeeding generations elsewhere; to
proceed chronologically would be to confuse the developments which the
divers genres underwent. We shall attempt therefore to survey the main
achievements in lyrical poetry, in the different kinds of prose and in the
theatre.

The Italian courts swarmed with rhymers good and bad, vying with
each other in the production of all manner of poems : the by now sancro-
sanct canzone and sonnet, traditional forms like ballads and carnival
songs, relatively new forms like the stanza or ottava rima. Others busied
themselves with the rehandling of romances, mainly French in origin and
unceasingly popular with all ranks of society, but the main preoccupation
was in the imitation of Petrarch. Lorenzo de’ Medici himself was no mean
adept in all kinds of verse. Repetition stales good matter and concentrates
upon manner; a reaction was inevitable. Pietro Bembo, purist and severe
self-critic, set up in face of this debased Petrarchism a loftier conception
of the lyric. Like Malherbe’s verse in France a century later, his Rime
(first collected edition 1530) excelled in formal perfection but lacked warmth ;
he had a host of imitators and became a ‘ canonical ’ model ; it is interesting
that he should have been one of the patterns chosen by the Pleiade in
France, whom Malherbe was to condemn as extravagant! The exag-
gerations of the Petrarchists were pilloried also by Francesco Berni (1497-
1535), who like Bembo dwelt much in the papal court, but his parodying of
them was but part of his humorous and satirical output, in the tradition
of Pulci and Burchiello, ridiculing the follies of society with such vividness,
such linguistic skill and such a keen sense of the absurd that he gave his
name to a whole genre of humorous satire. He had his forerunners not
only in Pulci and Burchiello but also in II Pistoia (1436-1502), whose
satirical poems even include one on the French invasion of Italy ! Nor
must we forget that some of the powerful sonnets of Michelangelo may
well date from our period in stark contrast to the Petrarchising of the
smaller fry. Nor was didactic poetry lacking, as witness Le Api of Rucellai,
based on Virgil’s Georgies. But if the lyric flourished, the most important
achievements of the age were to be found in romance and epic.

Long before the end of the Middle Ages the distinction between epic
and romance had been lost ; or rather a fusion of the noble exploits of
Charlemagne and his peers with the amazing adventures and the chival-
rous courtesy of the roman d’aventure and the Arthurian matter had
produced a somewhat indeterminate genre, now in verse, increasingly in
prose, but subject to infinite rehandling. In Italy in the 1480’s Sannazaro’s
Arcadia, a pastoral romance in prose with verse interludes, emphasised
the courteous element with vague and usually pathetic or emotional
situations against a clearly drawn background compounded of an imagined
Arcadia and an idealised Campagna. With its elegant and often inflated
diction, it was to be much imitated in the future, not only in Italy.

172

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

Nearer, however, to the traditional romance was the Morgante Maggiore
of Luigi Pulci (1432-84), an intimate of Lorenzo. This burlesque epic of
the Charlemagne matter has been variously judged : as sheer buffoonery
or as the fooling of a cultured bourgeois: as possessing a wealth of
imagination or as commonplace and never rising to pure fantasy: as
concealing a sinister scepticism or as merely parodying popular taste : as
having in Astarotte, the devil, a powerful representation of contemporary
man with his problems, or as failing even to see that this was so. The
rapid and boisterous work was destined to influence many, Rabelais
included. On the very threshold of our period and under the influence of
the Ferrara court appeared the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo (c. 1440-
94), an unfinished poem in complete contrast with Pulci’s. Its title in-
dicates the fusion of epic and romance and the story is treated with the
imagination and dignity of courtly chivalry ; adventures and tales told by
the personages embellish and complicate the structure and these episodes,
sometimes of normal romantic type, sometimes akin to the novelle, are
rich in invention and skilfully narrated. The style, however, was harsh
and graceless. Early in the sixteenth century Niccolo degli Agostini wrote
an ending to it, but this, and indeed Boiardo’s poem, were overshadowed
by Bemi’s rewriting of the Orlando Innamorato in polished Tuscan. Before
passing to Ariosto, we may mention the Mambriano of Francesco Bello
(II Cieco), a poem of similar spirit published posthumously in 1509; it
was not well constructed and never enjoyed much favour.

Lodovico Ariosto (1474-1533) was undoubtedly the greatest of them
all. Like Boiardo he belonged to the Este circle, though his relations with
some members of that family were not comfortable. His early lyrics need
not detain us, but in his Satires the gentle irony of an easy-going and
humorous nature can be seen ; some of them were composed during our
period, intensely personal poems, perhaps not intended for publication
and cast in the general mould of the Horatian satire or epistle. His
comedies will be dealt with later. The Orlando Furioso, on which Ariosto’s
fame chiefly rests, was conceived as a continuation of Boiardo’s poem.
It was begun in the first decade of the century, but the first edition of
forty cantos did not appear till 1516 at the expense of his patron, the
Cardinal Ippolito d’Este; a second edition of 1521 was followed by a
definitive edition of forty-six cantos in 1532. Once again epic and romantic
elements are fused, the background to the main events of the story being
the epic struggle between Christians and Saracens. The madness of
Orlando, its progress and cure, are interrupted by a succession of highly
varied episodes, heroic, pathetic and even comic, involving a multitude
of personages. A secondary plot, the loves of Roger and Bradamante,
imagined as the founders of the Este house, spoils some passages for the
modem reader with flattery, but this and other flaws — occasional lapses
into impropriety, exaggerations in imagery or affectations in expression

14 173 NCMHI

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

— matter little against the ease, clarity and smooth movement of the narra-
tive, the perfection of style and the purity of the language. Ariosto is not
only a greater artist than Boiardo, but his attitude and tone are different.
He does not take his knights and their chivalry with the same seriousness;
indeed he seems to write, in places, with his tongue in his cheek. He does
not eschew satire nor even, as in the portrait and exploits of Astolfo the
English knight, caricature and burlesque. He blends a little Pulci with a
polished Boiardo. The man himself comes through, urbane, humorous,
ironical, gentle and clear-sighted, in the lively, picturesque flow. No great
profundity is to be found or even expected, but, superficial in some sense
as the poem may seem, it helped to establish the literary language of Italy
and it exercised upon posterity a great and lasting influence.

It would seem to be the man Teofilo Folengo (1496-1544) who comes
through, too, in the rumbustious Baldus. Already in 1490 Tifi Odasi of
Padua had used macaronic jargon, a mixture of Italian and Latin, in his
Macaronea to mock epico-romantic matter. It was this medium which
Folengo, an unfrocked monk who later returned to his monastery, chose
as a comic weapon wherewith to batter the same victim. His other work
was in much the same vein : the Moschaea, relating a war between the flies
and the ants, was imitated from the Batrachomyomachia ; the Zanitonella
parodied the Petrarchan and Arcadian love-poems in a rustic setting; the
Orlandino, not published till 1526, continued the parodic vein in literary
Italian. The Baldus or, as it is better known with a variety of spellings,
the Macaronea, was published in twenty-five books in 1519, its author
using the pseudonym of Merlin Cocai. The amazing mock epic seized the
public fancy and had six editions in four years. The beginning closely
resembles the Orlandino, but the names are changed and soon the per-
sonages are off into a succession of wild adventures which end in hell,
where, finding himself in congenial company with all the frauds and
deceivers, including astrologers and poets, the author bids us goodbye with
a final poke of fun at his hero, at himself and at his own artistic hotchpotch.
The vigorous mock-epic style clothes the most vulgar matter, but there
are charming sketches and there is a deeper satirical vein, as if he were
determined, earnestly if at times obscenely, to destroy by his buffoonery
the hollow art, the social graces and conventions, the literary posturings
and the worship of a dead chivalry, the scholasticism and the religious
shams of his age. He saw futility around him, but he is basically moral.
Evil is not made attractive in his stark realism. The importance of this
lively parody was not lost on Rabelais nor on Samuel Butler.

At the end of the fifteenth century the Italian theatre was already showing
some signs of classical influence, but though Seneca, Plautus and Terence
were known to the scholars and in some of the noble courts, they were not
yet capable of transforming the drama. The old farces were still popular,
as they were to be for some time to come, while in the serious vein the

174

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

dominant kind was the sac re rappresentazioni. These plays had not only
literary merit sometimes, but were the occasion of magnificent spectacles,
for their performance was a craze, chiefly at the courts but also sometimes
at the expense of a municipality. The humanist Poliziano had used the
sacra rappresentazione form for his Orfeo at Mantua in 1471, but had
infused into it a profane subject and an elegiac tone. Lorenzo il Magnifico
himself wrote a Rappresentazione dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo, performed in
1489 and exhibiting the same lyrical elegance as his shorter poems. The
further development of this genre was, for literary purposes, stifled even-
tually by the growing vogue of Seneca, whose tragedies had been printed
and some translated before the end of the fifteenth century. Senecan
traits may be detected in a few vernacular pieces, but the reign of Senecan
tragedy was not to be fully established until after 1 540, with the plays of
Cinthio. In the meantime Pistoia’s Panfila (1499) took a story from the
Decamerone, changed the names and presented Seneca himself as Prologue.
The insipid Sofonisba of Caretto (1502) was followed by the Sofonisba of
Trissino (1515), an attempt at a ‘classical’ tragedy divided into acts, with
choruses in lyrical metres ; but it was not printed until 1524 nor performed
again till 1562. Rucellai’s Rosmunda (1515), though not without some
Senecan influence, escaped from the actionless lyrical drama by reason of
its horrific plot based on an incident in Lombard history.

Comedy (as in France half a century later) was more lively and produced
more notable works, partly no doubt because comedy had behind it a
living farce, partly because it could draw upon the collections of novelle,
but principally because, when all is said, it is nearer to life, especially to
the artificial, vicious and extravagant life of contemporary Italy. About
1508 Cardinal Bibbiena’s Calandria was performed at Urbino and then
in Rome, lavishly produced with hidden musicians and ballet-like inter-
mezzi on classical themes. The ingredients of the comedy are those of a
novella ; a doltish husband, an astute and cynical go-between who tricks
and fools the husband, a brother and sister so alike that confusing disguises
produce equivocal situations, all this in an outward shape imitated from
Latin comedy, yet unmistakably Italian and alive. There is no psycho-
logical profundity, no underlying liaison of events ; it is the events them-
selves which matter, the complication of incident. Machiavelli’s Man-
dr ago la, written at some time between 1504 and 1513, but not printed
until 1524, was not the author’s only dramatic work; he had translated
Terence’s Andria; his Clizia adapted the form of Latin comedy to a
portrayal of the life of a Florentine family. The Mandragola might seem
to be more remote than the Clizia from the ordinary business of the
citizen, but it had far more profound qualities. A bare summary of the
plot (Callimaco with the aid of a parasite outwits the foolish Nicia and
enjoys Nicia’s wife) would appear to place the comedy in the same class
as Bibbiena’s, but a closer examination reveals two features which make

175 14-a

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

it not merely far superior to the Calandria as comedy, but the cleverest
comedy of the Cinquecento. In the first place, the plot is extraordinarily
tightly constructed, every move carefully calculated and subtly produced ;
in the second place this calculation is based upon a penetrating, if cynical,
observation of human nature. All the characters are vivid, but two in
particular impress themselves on the memory: Nicia the foolish and
pompous husband, strong in the conceit of his own wisdom but whipped
by the author from situation to situation, each revealing his colossal
stupidity, and Fra Timoleo, the venal and cynical confessor, painfully
aware of the shamefulness of his conduct but (like Parmeno in Terence’s
Eunuchus) easing his conscience by explanations to himself, and becoming
the chief instrument in bringing Callimaco to Lucrezia’s bed. Machiavelli
laughs at human folly and corruption, but he does not appear to be
indignant; he dissects and analyses them unemotionally and dispas-
sionately. Incidentally, too, he reveals the attitude of mind which pope and
prince seem to have adopted towards the iniquities which he portrays. At the
same time he fuses into one great, if immoral, work the comedy of intrigue
and the comedy of character. The comedy is written in lively dialogue
which carries the action along without hitch and is always admirably suited
to the personages concerned, so that the fantastic plot carries conviction.

Ariosto too made his contribution to the Italian stage. He was made
superintendent of the ducal theatre at Ferrara, where, ever since i486,
Plautus and Terence had been performed in Latin; it is not surprising if
he turned to these models for his own comedies, five in number, the last
of which, Gli Studenti, remained unfinished. The first, the Cassaria, was
purely imitative; its personages, taken from the Plautine and Terentian
stock, dubbed with Italian names, revolve in a complex intrigue according
to recipe; the play was a success because it repeated in the vernacular
what was familiar to its audiences in Latin. The Suppositi (1509) made a
better comedy, with substitution as the theme, but kept to the pattern and,
like the Negromante (1520) was to serve as a model for French comedy in
the latter half of the century. This last-named play has more lively action
and dialogue, but lacks the reality of Machiavelli’s comedy ; the astrologer
of the title is not a real astrologer, whose art could then be ridiculed, but
an ignorant and bumptious charlatan who is continually revealing his own
stupidity and being taken down by his own servant. The intrigue is
conventional and complicated, but Ariosto has his moments when he
infuses into the Terentian pattern snatches of satirical observation of his
own; yet this comedy and the Lena (1529) remain inferior to the Man-
dragola and to Aretino’s Cortegiana. The energetic and licentious Aretino
(1492-1556) poured into his comedies (most of which lie strictly outside
our period) the personages of his own dissolute world : harlots, panders,
hypocrites and ruffians ; he disregards, when it pleases him, the ‘ rules ’ of
the genre and often gains vigour by his neglect of ‘regularity’ and if his

176

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

works lack the tight construction of the Mandragola they have their own
merits of gusto, of the uninhibited reproduction of a shameless, cynical,
debauched but comic society. It is interesting that Ariosto wrote his
earlier comedies in prose, but rewrote them later in sdruccioli which he
regarded as nearer to his models and as representing adequately the
freedom of ordinary dialogue.

Prose indeed flourished at this time. To pick out some significant works,
we may turn first to Bembo, who was the author of two prose works of
some interest. The Asolani (composed about 1 500-2, printed in 1 505 and
dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia), a work of vulgarisation in the good sense,
explained in Platonic dialogue form the principles of Platonic love, a task
for which Bembo, who was editing Petrarch at about this time for Aldus,
was well fitted. The dialogues are eloquent, if rather long-winded and
languid. A similar form was used for the Prose della volgar lingua, begun
in the early years of the century, perhaps perfected between 1506 and
1512 and circulated in manuscript, but not printed till 1525. In them the
much debated question of literary language is discussed and largely
settled; Bembo comes down on the side of the vernacular as against Latin
and, among the vulgar tongues available, on the side of Tuscan. His
elegance, his judicious arguments, his authority as scholar and poet did
much to make the Tuscan victory complete. In another field, the Corte-
giano of Baldesar Castiglione (1478-1529) had a similar influence. This
writer too was the author of graceful letters, of polished poems in Latin
and Italian and of a dramatic eclogue, / Tirsi. The Cortegiano was begun
at Urbino in 1507 or thereabouts and was printed in 1528; in dialogue
form it examined the nature of the gentleman, and the ideal reached in
this perhaps idealised picture of the Urbino court and its interests had in
France and in England as well as in Italy an enormous and lasting influence.
The accepted ideal of the hidalgo was a successful rival in Spain.

In this age of diplomacy, intrigue and war, letters, diaries and memoirs
were many. ‘Serious’ annals and the like were still written in Latin, but
the vernacular does appear. Bisticci (1421-98) left his Vite d’uomini
illustri del secolo XV and a companion work on illustrious ladies. In
vernacular history proper, however, the names of Machiavelli (1469-1527)
and Guicciardini (1483-1540) are the most eminent, though the dates of
publication of their major works sometimes fall into a later period. We
have already met the former as a dramatist, but he had no mean repute
as a poet for his sonnets, stanze, burlesque and satirical capitoli, carnival
songs, rhymed chronicles (the Decennali, 1506-9) in terza rima, as a tale-
teller for his Belfagor arcidiavolo (1515), a traditional story enriched by
his raciness, as a writer on language in the dialogue Della lingua (1514)
and as the observant and cool author of various reports on political and
administrative matters which range from 1499 onwards. Some of the
works by which he is best known, the Principe (1513), the Discorsi (1512

177

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

onwards) and the Arte della guerra (1519-20), were composed or begun
while he was in temporary retirement at San Casciano and his great
Istorie fiorentine, commissioned in 1520, was published only in 1525. The
Principe was a kind of excursus from his discourse on Livy; it treated,
succinctly and unsentimentally, the nature of princeship and how it was
to be maintained and developed. It has aroused violent judgments,
particularly on moral grounds, but it is not primarily a work of cynical
‘ machiavellianism’ ; it is an appraisal of an existing and possible situation;
it looks beyond Italian disunity to the ideal of a strong and united Italy
and to the means whereby that ideal could be achieved. This achievement
was, for Machiavelli, of more immediate importance than accepted morals
or traditional law. With this book, as with Discorsi and the Vita di
Castruccio (1520), the portrait of the Machiavellian ideal of man, and with
the Istorie fiorentine, the author not only set up a purely intellectual and
amoral attitude to public affairs but also gave the example of a prose
style to match, clear, concise, calm and even meditative, orderly and
remarkably modern. Guicciardini really belongs to a later generation,
one affected by Machiavelli’s thought as by the increasing and chaotic
corruption of Italian politics, and we need mention here only his early
work, the Storia fiorentina of 1508, a lively record of Florence in the
strange days of Savonarola written with insight and a remarkable sense
of the concatenation of events.

The other important prose genre of medieval and Renaissance Italy,
the novella, had no remarkable fortune in our period except as a source.
The collections of Masuccio Salernitano and Giovanni Sabbadino were
all completed in the 1470’s and 1480’s, while Bandello’s works, perhaps
already being collected, were not published until long afterwards, as were
the significant writings of Firenzuola, Pietro Aretino, Benvenuto Cellini
and others.

In the Spanish peninsula and Spanish Italy, our three decades were a
time of promise and of achievement. The union of Castile and Aragon
and the growth of the joint realm as a Great Power in Europe and overseas,
the development of Portugal into an imperial Power, gave the inhabitants
of these lands a sense of strength and destiny. The long struggle with the
Moors delayed the end of the Middle Ages, but the new and glorious
epoch stimulated activity in arts and letters as well as in conquest. The
full impact of classical and Italian humanism was still to be felt, in spite
of the close contact between the two Mediterranean peninsulas, and in
many respects Spanish literature was for long to bear strongly marked
individual traits. Even in the most advanced works of our period a strong
medieval flavour was to be found, though new models were sought and
followed. It is not merely convenient, but necessary, to avoid any strict
separation of tills literature into Castilian, Portuguese and Catalan. Not
only was Castilian advancing steadily to the status of ‘Spanish’ and

178

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

gradually eliminating dialect literature, but more than one author wrote
in more than one language, while works in Portuguese and Catalan were
often translated into Castilian. In 1492 the first grammar of Castilian was
written by the humanist Nebrija and three years later the same scholar
issued his Latin-Spanish, Spanish-Latin dictionary. At the same time,
here as in other lands, new universities were being founded, libraries
collected, translations of classical and Italian literature made. Yet the
general background would not at first sight appear conducive to literary
or artistic production; the activities of the Inquisition, the expulsion of
Jews (1492) and of the Moors (1502) may well, however, have helped to
prevent the growth of cynicism, luxury and virtu which abounded in
Italy, as the advent of the Reformation inhibited these excesses in France,
Germany and England. Popular literature had its ballads, its rehandling
of old romances, like El Baladro del sabio Merlin (1498) or La Demanda
del Sancto Grial (1515), its religious rapresentaciones and autos, its tglogas
and its farces. The major works themselves are so bound, in general, to
older works that reference backwards in time is inevitable; especially as
works of considerable importance now printed for the first time had
already been written, read and known for years.

The two great events in the realm of lyrical poetry were the printing of
the Cancionero general of Hernando del Castillo in 1511 and of the
Cancioneiro geral of Garcia de Resende in 1515. The former, containing
nearly a thousand pieces mainly of earlier composition but including a
number of contemporary poems, ran into many editions during the cen-
tury; it had a section of obras de bur la which in 1529 developed into a
separate collection of burlesque and frequently obscene poems. The
Resende collection consisted mainly of poems in Portuguese but sig-
nificantly included a number of pieces in Castilian. In both collections
the majority of the writers were skilful versifiers in the courteous tradition,
artificial, uninspired, but elegant and highly polished ; and both bring to
an end, to all intents and purposes, the tradition of these song-books.
New fashions were soon to take their place, for already in the contents
were signs of Petrarchan influence and of classical antiquity. Few, how-
ever, of the poets writing before 1520 can be placed very high, though
Pedro Manuel Jimenez de Urrea, whose Castilian works appeared in
1513, wrote to his wife and his mother personal poems which are generally
acknowledged to be pleasing, while his re-handling of the end of the
Celestina in an egloga and of its whole matter in his prose Penitencia de
Amor (1514) testify to his interest in that remarkable work, to which we
shall come later. Satirical verse was not unknown, but, like the abounding
religious and devotional verse, it need not detain us.

The most important writing of the time was in prose. Alfonso Martinez
de Toledo, archpriest of Talavera, wrote a work called Reprobacion del
amor mundano but better known as the Corbacho (after Boccaccio’s

179

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Corbaccio)-, it was finished in 1438, but not printed till 1498. It was a
satirical and didactic treatise on morals, male and female, calling for its
material on Catalan and Italian sources as well as on the author’s own
experience; its style was exuberant, its imaginative qualities fertile, its
satire energetic and its language popular. To this half-didactic, half-
novelistic literature Diego de San Pedro contributed his Tratado de Amores
de Arnalte y Lucenda (1491), which contained letters and reflections on
love and, the following year, his Carcel de Amor, a better-known work
which combined in a somewhat confused but stimulating array personal
recollections, psychological analysis, wonderful adventures and subtle
allegories. Continuing and developing the tradition of the Fiammetta, it
was immediately popular and was frequently reprinted and widely trans-
lated. It was imitated in the Cuestion de Amor, composed in Naples,
where the action takes place, between 1508 and 1512, and attributed to
Vasquez, the author of a similar work, the Dechado de Amor (c. 1510).
The Tratado de Grimalte y Gradissa was another continuation of the
Fiammetta -, it dated from the closing years of the fifteenth century and was
still being read in the 1520’s, when it took a new title. The narrative prose
masterpiece of our period was, however, undoubtedly the Amadis de Gaula,
destined to play a great part in the history of the European novel. Its
matter had been known in the peninsula for a couple of hundred years
and derives ultimately from the French Arthurian romance tradition.
Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo claims to be merely the editor of older
material, but the fourth and fifth books are almost certainly his own.
The first four books were printed in 1 508, though they seem to have been
set down some fifteen years earlier. Enormously popular, frequently
reprinted and translated into almost all the languages of Europe, it
expounds the most refined chivalrous ideals of the time, giving examples
of feudal loyalty and knightly conduct and thus embodying, though its
setting was not Spanish, a typically Spanish spirit of romantic chivalry
in an easy and colourful, though occasionally redundant, style. It
influenced the development of the prose romance outside as well as inside
Spain, though the genre often degenerated into the foolish and artificial
forms which Cervantes was to scarify. The author of Don Quixote,
however, found something to approve in the earlier Catalan burlesque
romance Tirant lo Blanch of Johanot Martorell, which was translated
into Castilian in 1511. The years that followed saw many imitations and
continuations of the Amadis matter and the formation of a similar group
in the Palmerin romances, one of which, Palmerin de Inglaterra, first
appeared in a Portuguese version.

The only work which can be compared in importance with the Amadis
was the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, or La Celestina, a work
difficult to classify. In spite of its title of ‘tragicomedy’, it is perhaps
better described as a prose narrative in dramatic form. The oldest known

180

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

edition (Burgos, 1499) contains sixteen ‘ acts but later editions intercalate
new acts bringing the number to twenty-two. The authorship has been
much disputed, but it is now generally agreed that the author of all but
the first act was a converted Jew, Fernando de Rojas. He constantly
insists upon his moral intentions in composing this story of the ill-fated
loves of two young people against a background of crime and corruption
displayed with stark realism which contrasts effectively with the idyllic
and pathetic love-story. The popularity of the secondary title is due to
the amazing and horrifying portrait of the procuress Celestina, whose
cynical intrigues are covered by a specious pietism. The literary sources
are many, from Terence and Ovid to medieval tales, but the work remains
highly original and in its realistic psychology far superior to the Amadis.
For more than a hundred and fifty years the Celestina profoundly in-
fluenced the Spanish novel and drama and, through its numerous trans-
lations, the novel and drama of other European countries.

A number of vernacular chronicles composed in earlier years were
first printed in our period, among which must be mentioned the Genera-
ciones e Semblanzas of Fernan Perez de Guzman, a useful series of con-
temporary biographies incorporated around 1450 in the Mar de Historias,
which was printed in 1512 and imitated in Alonso de Toledo’s Espejo de las
Historias. Other historical works were Diego de Valera’s Cronica (1482)
and Memorial de diversas hazanas, a rehandling of Alfonso de Palencia’s
earlier Decadas; Enriquez de Castillo’s Cronica de Enrique IV, over-
eloquent and partial, but showing powers of observation ; Hernando del
Pulgar’s Claros varones (1500) and his panegyric Cronica de. . .los Reyes
Catolicos, not printed till 1565, but translated into Latin by Nebrija. The
main interest of such works is biographical, but other aspects of history
are not neglected. The more ambitious works on history and philosophy
were, of course, still written in Latin, but a vernacular work which deserves
mention as influential during our period, though written before it, was the
Vision deleitable de la Filosofia y de las scienfias by Alfonso de la Torre;
it was one of the last of the medieval encyclopaedias and, as the title
suggests, had as its framework an allegory in which Reason, Wisdom,
Nature and similar personifications sum up the knowledge of the period.

The theatre (apart from the Celestina, if that work can count as drama)
has few names of note. Juan del Encina (c. 1468-c. 1529) contributed both
in Spain and in Spanish Italy to the developing theatre by enriching and
secularising existing forms, until then traditionally religious ; he infused a
lyrical manner (his conception of poetry, based on the teachings of Nebrija,
is expounded in his Arte de la poesia of 1496) and was the better able to
do so as he was a skilled musician; and he introduced pleasing and
fruitful peasant types to the stage. The Propalladia (1517) of Bartolome
de Torres Naharro contained pieces produced in Italy and showing Italian
and Latin influence in the complexity of their intrigue and their division

181

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

into prologue and five ‘jornadas’, a kind of transition from the ‘days’ of
the mystery to the five acts prescribed by Horace. The greatest dramatist
of the age was, however, the Portuguese Gil Vicente (c. 1465-c. 1536), a
versatile poet and silversmith of whose forty-four plays sixteen are in
Portuguese, eleven in Castilian, seventeen in mixed language. His earlier
dramatic works were mainly religious, connected with the great festivals,
but from 1508 he turned to the secular and humorous kind; his greatest
work, in his later years, included both farces and his three eschatological
‘autos’ Inferno, Purgatorio and Gloria. His lyrical inspiration, his keen
insight into human nature, his range of humour make him the most
interesting figure of this time of transition in two languages.

In France too this generation of writers exemplifies perhaps even more
clearly the decay, but not death, of the medieval tradition and the first
effects of Italian and humanist influence. The Roman de la Rose with all
that it entailed by way of allegory, eroticism and didacticism, was still a
dominant influence. The works of Villon were being printed and read;
between 1489 and 1533 a score of more or less defective editions of his
poems saw the light. Dante had been known to earlier centuries and the
Inferno was translated into French tercets towards the end of the fifteenth
century. Direct and stimulating contact with Italy was made when
Charles VIII invaded it in 1494; the invasion was the discovery of an ex-
citing country. Intercourse became continuous ; Frenchmen like Bude and
Lazare de Ba'if travelled or studied in Italy; Lefevre d’Ftaples met Ficino,
Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano; Italian soldiers, diplomats, scholars,
artists came to France. The great city of Lyons with its industries, its
printing presses, its authority as a former capital and its wonderful
strategic position not only gave shelter to Italian exiles but built up twin
traditions of humanist and Italian culture. Italian literature was revealed
to France by translations: of the Decamerone in 1485, of the Trionfi of
Petrarch in 1514; of the Paradiso between 1515 and 1524; of Pulci’s
Morgante in 1519 and so on. At the same time were being printed editions
of ancient authors, translations, commentaries. Verard printed a Terence
in prose and verse about 1500; Octovien de Saint-Gelais translated the
Aeneid in 1509; Marot the first eclogue of Virgil in 1512, and there were
many more. Charles VIII brought the hellenist Lascaris back with him
to France. Erasmus studied at the College de Montaigu and published
his Adages in Paris in 1 500. Bude, Erasmus’s great rival, was hard at work.
But the full fruits of this activity were to be reaped later. The three great
names of this generation were Jean Lemaire de Beiges, Commynes and
Gringore; they have a ring of the medieval about them, but all point
forward in their different ways.

This was the Age of the Grands Rhetoriqueurs, versifiers and often
historiographers who were the feeble if verbose offspring of the bourgeois
lyrical tradition of the past two centuries. They flourished first in the courts

182

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

of Burgundy and Flanders, around the person of Margaret of Austria,
and only gained notable positions in the French court when the death of
Louis XI opened the gates to them. The subjects of their poems, as of
their prose, were many and varied: love and chivalry, statecraft and
history, religion and morals, science and art, but their treatment was flat
and didactic, with rarely a real personal note to enliven it. These matters
they smothered in allegory, mythology, personifications. Their language
was stilted, full of verbal ingenuities, inflated with ill-digested Latinisms,
while their versification was vitiated by the conception of verse as a ‘second
rhetoric’. They excelled in the fixed form, infinitely complicated with
elaborate rhyme schemes and exaggeratedly rich rhymes. Yet some have
left their names not without credit: Meschinot (c. 1420-91), whose
allegorical Lunettes des Princes in prose and verse had over twenty
editions between 1493 and 1539; Molinet (1435-1507), chronicler in the
Burgundian service and author of a prose Roman de la Rose with appended
moral commentaries ; Coquillart (d. 1490) who is remembered for some for-
cible satire; Chastellain, the doyen of the Burgundians; Cretin (d. c.1525),
a Parisian with such a reputation that even Clement Marot could call him
a ‘sovereign poet’; Jean Marot (c. 1465-1526) who taught his more
celebrated son the art of versification which he was to use so skilfully.
For all their shortcomings, these craftsmen did make some contribution ;
they tried to wed poetry to learning; they drew, according to their lights,
on ancient Latin literature; they insisted on the value of technique. But
they were interested too closely in superficial form and they were ignorant
of their own national heritage except through late rehandlings in debased
form. Clement Marot, who was to liberate himself from the bonds of
rhetoric but yet employ some of its skills in the creation of a new and lively
personal poetry, was at this time still writing in the fashion of his mentors,
as his earlier work like the Temple de Cupido (1515) bears witness. But
in 1519 he was to enter the service of Marguerite d’Alengon, later of
Navarre, there to receive the first elements of his real poetic education
before he passed to the service of Francis I and emancipation.

Apart from the younger Marot, Jean Lemaire de Beiges (c. 1 47 3-c. 1515)
was the greatest, because the most emancipated, of the Grands Rhetori-
queurs. After serving the due de Bourbon and Louis de Luxembourg, he
entered the train of Margaret of Austria and then that of Anne of Brittany
and distinguished himself as poet, historiographer, diplomat and traveller;
he was a man of independent judgment and wide interests. His official
poems were ingenious, but his three main works have other qualities. The
Epistres de I’Amant Vert (printed 1511), supposedly written by Margaret
of Austria’s pet parrot, recounted in graceful verse and lively diction the
bird’s suicide in his distress at his mistress’s absence and his journeyings
to the beasts’ Hades and Elysium, not, of course, without the display of
considerable erudition. The Concorde des deux langages (composed 15 n,

183

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

printed 1513 and frequently afterwards) takes triple allegorical form: the
poet visits the temple of Venus, which he describes in decasyllabic terza
rima, but finds no peace; a prose interlude brings him to the temple of
Minerva, which he deals with in alexandrines. There Honour and all virtues
are to be found. He confronts French and Italian, not linguistically as
the title would suggest, but on the plane of letters and learning, where
they are equal and should collaborate in fruitful and noble rivalry. The
Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye (in three books, composed
and printed 1510-13) develops the medieval legend of the foundation of
France by Francus, a son of Hector, in a kind of universal history from
the Flood to the establishment of Francus in Gaul. Classical antiquity is
freely plundered, while passages of charming description and lush imagery
show at once an advance in the appreciation of ancient literature and a
feeling for the suggestive value of words ; show also why Ronsard was later
to take this legend for the framework of his epic failure, the Franciade.
Lemaire was still a Rhetoriqueur, sometimes pedantic and uncritical
especially in the earlier allegory-laden work, but as he progresses his
erudition becomes more alive, his sensibility more acute, his taste in verse
and his command of words more fruitful of harmony and clarity.

French prose is old-fashioned, represented by a mass of chronicles,
treatises and discourses written by Rhetoriqueur s, by translations, by the
vigorous and essentially popular sermons of a Michel Menot (1450-1518)
or an Olivier Maillard (c. 1450-1502), by prose rehandlings of romances
and romanticised epics and by tales or collections of tales like the Quinze
Joyes de Mariage, the Petit Jehan de Saintre of Antoine de la Sale or the
Cent nouvelles nouvelles which, though it claims descent from the De-
cameron, has borrowed nothing but the superficial ‘nouvelle’ form. All
of these were composed well before our period.

Only one name approaches first-rank greatness: that of Philippe de
Commynes (c. 1447-1511). This highly intelligent and practical man of
Flemish descent was an astute psychologist, a skilful politician and
diplomat, who passed from the service of the duke of Burgundy to that of
Louis XI, in whom he found not only an appreciative master but a
kindred spirit. His later fortunes were not so happy. His Memoires are
in two parts, of which the first, composed in the years around 1490, dealt
with events between 1464 and 1483 and first appeared in print in 1524;
the second, composed towards the end of his life, narrated the Italian
expeditions of Charles VIII and was printed in 1528. Written as material
for a Latin life of Louis XI which was to be undertaken by the archbishop
of Vienne, the Memoires make no claim to literary merit, of which,
however, they are not devoid. Commynes was concerned with events and
he disdained the stylistic acrobatics of the Rhetoriqueurs and wrote in a
plain, unadorned style, sometimes heavy, but often possessing admirable
precision and appositeness. His perceptive powers, his skill in analysis,

184

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

his penetration into the relationship of events, his devotion to the interests
of king and state, his coolness and apparent detachment from moral
considerations have given rise to a conception of Commynes as a fore-
runner of Machiavelli. He certainly believes in diplomacy and its arts,
but he prefers, when he can, to have morality and public opinion on his
side and, in his reflections on the progress of events, he perceives a force
which may intervene and bring about an unforeseeable upshot. This force
he sees as the will of God and not the mere play of hazard, for, in spite of
superficial appearances, Commynes was a Christian. His intellectual
approach to events and the operation of cause and effect, his powers of
abstraction and generalisation make him the first really modern historian,
whose work might indeed have been injured for us by a greater attention
to stylistic adornment.

The history of the French theatre at this time is almost devoid of
landmarks ; few works are dateable with precision and these are but part
of a general movement which stretches from 1450 to 1550 and beyond.
The great mystery-plays date mainly from about the middle of the
fifteenth century and were still being played ; they rarely leave the religious
field and may deal on a large scale with the principal events of biblical
history or with the lives and miracles of individual saints. They might
involve a whole village or town and last for weeks, or merely a small
confraternity and last one day; they might be performed for a great
festival or be played for the cessation of a plague or in the hope of a good
harvest. They are essentially popular, which accounts for their general
lack of literary worth, though successful passages are to be found, and
for their mixture of serious and comic scenes, the latter of which were to
degenerate into mischievous pranks on which authority frowned. In
Paris the Confrerie de la Passion was chiefly concerned with their pro-
duction until in 1548 a decree put a stop to it. Other bodies were con-
cerned with dramatic production in both Paris and the provinces. The
clerks of the Paris Parlement, for instance, were organised into a veritable
corporation, the Basoche, which played mysteries, moralities and farces;
the clerks of the Chatelet had their own Basoche, those of the Cour des
Comptes their Empire de Galilee, while similar bodies existed in Dijon,
Rouen, Lyons and other important towns. Another Parisian body was
the Enfans sans Souci or the Sots, with their Prince des Sots and Mere
Sotte, who organised soties, farces and moralities, usually on Shrove
Tuesday. It is not easy to draw a clear line between these various kinds of
play, but some general distinctions can be made. In general the morality
was a dramatised allegory, employing personifications for didactic pur-
poses, but comic moralities were frequent, like that of Andre de la Vigne
who attached to his Mystery of Saint Martin an amusing morality in which
a blind man and a lame man are cured of their infirmities against their
wish and react to the situation in well-imagined different ways or the

185

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Condamnation de Banquet (about 1507, by Nicholas de la Chesnaye) where
a comic treatment is used to condemn gluttony. It is interesting to note
that in 1 548 Sebillet, discussing tragedy and comedy, found parallels for
both in the morality. The farce, which survived well into the seventeenth
century, was normally a brief and robust dramatisation of a situation
illustrating the inconstancy of women, the vulnerability of a man’s skin
or purse, indeed any common human weakness. Like the earlier narrative
fabliau, which it resembled in tone, it varied from skilful if summary
psychological portrayal to depths of obscenity. Its octosyllabic verse was
rapid and effective. The famous Pathelin (1470) is an exception in its
length, in its organisation and its continuously high level of observation
and literary skill. The so tie, often played along with a farce and a morality,
sometimes had topical application. The Nouveau Monde, perhaps by
Andre de la Vigne and played by the Sots in 1508, deals with the Pragmatic
Sanction; Gringore’s Prince des Sots (1512) attacked the Pope Julius II
and was reinforced by a morality, Peuple frangois, Peuple italique, l' Homme
obstint, on the differences between the pope and Louis XII, the ‘ obstinate
man’ being, of course, the pope. The so tie Le Monde, Abus, les Sots
(about 1514) is of more general import and shows that the world, in spite
of those who wish to rebuild it on folly and corruption, will remain what
it was. It will be noted that allegory plays an important part in these
soties. Pierre Gringore was outstanding; he was Mere Sotte in 1511-12
and his bold Prince des Sots must have been written with the connivance,
if not at the instigation, of the king or his ministers. Gringore must have
been something of a public figure; he was certainly versatile, though much
of his work falls within the Rhetoriqueur tradition ; his Vie de Monseigneur
Sainct Loys (c. 1514) shows what appears to be real religious sentiment.
But it is doubtful if he deserved the idealisation which the Romantics
accorded him in the nineteenth century.

Provencal literature was by this time in a state of decay. Southern
French writers were composing almost entirely in French, though religious
drama in Provencal has left a few traces, but the pieces are of French
derivation. It is significant that a literary competition like the Jeux
Floraux of Toulouse opened its lists to French compositions in 1513
and that the last works crowned by such ‘ academies ’ at the end of the
fifteenth century show formalism taking the place of inspiration.

A similar movement in German lyric poetry is, in the light of the general
history of German verse, a most significant phenomenon: the decay of
the Minnesang and its replacement by the increasingly flourishing Meister-
gesang. The delicate love-songs of the early poets gave way in the fourteenth
century to the formal virtuosity and ostentatious learning of the ‘ Master’
poets (for example Frauenlob), this in its turn to the work of the guild-
organised verse-smiths of the south German cities — the Meistersinger,
with their grades of proficiency and codified rules. Few poets escaped

186

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

from the prevalent mechanical conception of verse-making. Much of
the work of the outstanding Meistersinger, Hans Sachs (1494-1576), falls
outside the Meistergesang genre, most of it indeed outside our period.
His chief significance lies perhaps in his exploitation of the Fastnacht spiel
or Shrovetide play, developed from the primitive mumming play under
the influence of the comic scenes in religious drama, which Germany
possessed in abundance for Christmas and Easter. The plays of Hans
Rosenpliit and Dietrich Schemberg’s Spiel von Frau Jutta (1480) had
already shown the way to the utilisation of comic anecdotes for dramatic
matter, a practice found in the works of Hans Folz who flourished in
Niirnberg around 1510. Pamphilus Gengenbach wrote moralising plays
of this kind between 1515 and 1518, and later Niklas Manuel of Berne
was to use the form to attack Catholic doctrine and practice. In the mean-
time folksongs appear to have flourished, the traditional allegorical poetry
based on the Roman de la Rose tradition was still popular but becoming
more and more artificial, while the chivalric romances became the object
of parody or were appearing more and more in debased rehandlings, like
Fiietrer’s J Such der Abenteuer. It is interesting therefore to see the Em-
peror Maximilian entering the lists and directing the composition of the
Theuerdank (1517), an allegorical account, with magnificent woodcuts, of
his exploits in the wooing of Mary of Burgundy.

Apart from the development of the Schwanke, comic anecdotes, the
main revivification of old matter is in the satirical vein, which produced
the masterpieces of the period. The first, in date of printing, was the
Narrenschiff (1494) of Sebastian Brant (1457-1521), a jurist and civic
magnate of Strassburg who had also to his credit Latin poems, legal
works, the editing of traditional jest-books and of a popular thirteenth-
century didactic work, Freidank’s Bescheidenheit. The Ship of Fools tells
in stinging satire and in lively memorable couplets the follies of mankind ;
the form is allegorical, the framework being a ship manned and steered
by fools, with fools as passengers, sailing to a fools’ paradise. It ran into
many editions with its exciting and amusing woodcuts, was translated
into many languages (including Latin) and everywhere exercised an
immediate influence. It was translated twice into English before 1509 -
In Germany it gave rise to sermons like those of Geiler von Kaisersberg
(1500, printed in Latin 1511) and to dependent satires like Thomas
Mumer’s Narrenbeschworung (1512). It was beloved by humanists and
unlearned alike. The Low German Reinke de Vos (Liibeck, 1498) put into
print matter which had already had a long history in the Netherlands,
Germany, France and elsewhere; it appears to have been based upon a
Flemish version which also served for Caxton’s Reynard the Fox of 1481.
In various rehandlings, this satirical beast-epic has never lost its popularity
and innumerable editions and adaptations have been published. Till
Eulenspiegel (1515) is connected with the Schwanke tradition; it is a

187

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

collection of pranks and jests attributed to a peasant of the early fourteenth
century and represents the revenge of the rustic mentality on the more
sophisticated townsman. Earlier collections had been made but have not
survived; the 1515 Strassburg collection was translated into many lan-
guages and for long served, in spite of its coarseness and because of its
ebullient energy, as a source-book and model for satirists. Among the
German satirists Thomas Mumer (1475-c. 1527) is eminent; the 1515
Till Euletispiegel has indeed been attributed to him on insufficient grounds.
He led an agitated wandering life, and was at one time Maximilian’s poet
laureate, but he could not settle down. In some works in the tradition of the
Narrenschiffht berated social follies and vices; of these the most notable
were the Gauchmatt (composed 1515, printed 1 5 1 9) on the follies of lovers,
and the self-explaining Von dem lutherischen Narren of 1 522. The Meister-
singer Gengenbach (1470-1524) also composed a Gauchmatt in 1518. In
the meantime translation of ancient literature had been going on: the
fable was popular and a number of collections, including both Latin and
German material, had appeared, notably that of Strassburg (1508) edited
by Johann Adelphus; another collection by Martinus Dorpius was several
times reprinted. A complete Terence in German appeared in 1499. Nor
must it be forgotten that the whole period was one of great activity in the
neo-Latin theatre, which, while falling strictly outside our rubric, must
be mentioned as having contributed much to the growth of the vernacular
drama, especially comedy, outside as well as inside Germany. In this
connection the name of Reuchlin is important ; his comedies were printed
in 1496.

Reuchlin’s most important influence lay, however, in the contribution
which, as scholar and humanist, he made to the creation of the atmosphere
in which Luther was to succeed. Other influences were, of course, at work.
In 1498 the sermons of Johannes Tauler, the fourteenth-century mystic,
were printed, while from before the beginning of the sixteenth century
the bold sermons of Geiler von Kaisersberg (1445-1510), the ‘German
Savonarola’, were being taken down by his friends and published, it
would seem, without his consent ; he used all that came to hand, including,
as we have seen, the Narrenschiff. Already before 1520 Luther was in
action; his ninety-five theses date from 1517 while in 1520 his three famous
‘Reformation treatises’ appeared: An den christ lichen Adel deutscher
Nation, Von der babylonischen Gefangenschaft and Von der Freiheit eines
Christenmenschen , treating respectively the duty of the German nation to
resist Roman exactions, the sacramental system and justification by faith.
It was on 10 December 1520 that Luther invited the people of the univer-
sity and town of Wittenberg to witness the burning of the bull of excom-
munication and other ‘Roman’ matter. A landmark was passed and the
rest of Luther’s work, including his Bible (finished 1534, New Testament
issued 1522), the influence of which on the Reformation, and on the

188

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

evolution of standard German prose style was enormous, belongs to a new
age. It may be remembered, however, that his was not the first German
translation; to mention only the main stream, the 1466 edition printed
in Strassburg by Mentelin, itself based on an earlier version, was the
source of at least thirteen other High German editions up to 1518 and
of four Low German editions up to 1522. These versions were dull and
lifeless, were full of errors and had relatively little influence.

The literature of the Low Countries at this time was, apart from medieval
survivals such as romances and religious and devotional writings, the
work of the flourishing Chambers of Rhetoric or Rederijkerskamers, guild-
like corporations with fanciful names and devoted to poetry and learning.
While the abundant religious drama of the fifteenth century was dying
( Het Spel van de heilig Sacramente attributed to Smeeken, but claimed
by some for Anthonis de Roovere, a rederijker of Bruges, and played at
Breda in 1 500 seeming to be one of the last), the rederijkers were developing
the morality. The most notable morality was the Elckerlijke, attributed to
Peter Dorlandus, written about 1470, performed in Antwerp about 1485
and printed in 1495 ; it may have been the original of the English Everyman.
These moralities, abele spelen, chiefly on themes of courtly exploits of
gallantry, and broad farces were presented by the Chambers of Rhetoric,
along with an occasional miracle such as the Mariken van Nieumeghen,
probably composed by a rederijker from Antwerp about 1500. These
dramatic works and some rhetorical lyrics appear to represent the chief
Netherlandish contribution to literature at this time, but little of it (unlike
some medieval matter like the Reinaert de Vos) reached what might be
called European stature.

The relations of English scholars with Erasmus and other continental
humanists are well known and some flavour of humanism is to be seen in
some of the English vernacular literature of the time. The main tradition,
however, is still medieval; in poetry the spell of Chaucer and that of
allegory were not yet to be shaken off. It is hard to believe that the world
of chivalry in which he moves is at all real for Stephen Hawes (1475-1530),
the dull didactic allegorist; his Example of Virtu (composed c. 1503,
printed 1512) and his Pastime of Pleasure (composed c. 1505) are tedious
moral adventures, marred by a latinised diction and a complicated
style. Alexander Barclay (1474-1552), a pious Franciscan, adapted
Brant’s Ship of Fools in 1509. He had earlier imitated Mantuan’s
eclogues rather stiffly for educational purposes. John Skelton (c. 1460-
1529), who earned the praise of Erasmus as a humanist but who was an
unsatisfactory parish priest, was for a time tutor of the future Henry VIII.
He established a reputation for himself as a vigorous " satirist and
incorrigible joker. In his satirical allegories he abandons the tradi-
tional heroic verse and adopts a ragged irregular rhythm with repeated
rhymes which, in his own words, ‘hath in it some pyth’. In his Bowge of

IJ 189 NCMHI

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Court (1499) he satirises court life in Chaucerian stanzas. His Colin Clout
(1519) attacked the clergy and even Wolsey himself, an attack repeated
in most scathing terms in Why come ye not to Court? (1522). His earlier
Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe was a lament on the death of Jane Scroupe’s
pet, based on Catullus but packed and stretched with reminiscences and
digressions. He also had a morality to his credit. This curious figure, who
recalls Rabelais and who possessed abundant invective, an exuberant
style, much pugnacity and some inklings of humanism, still belongs on
the whole to the medieval rather than to the Renaissance tradition. The
Scottish poets too retain a medieval tang. Robert Henryson (c. 1425-1500)
moved in a Chaucerian world. He gave a (to him) more satisfying end
to the tale of Troilus and Cressida in his Testament of Cresseid; his
Fabilis (fables) are well told and there is pathos and lyrical movement in
his Orpheus and Eurydice, ingenious rustic realism in his Robene and
Makyne. Of the whole Scottish group the most deservedly famous was
William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1520), though his output was not large and
his poems are usually short. But there is virtuosity in his allegories like the
Thrisseland the Rois (Thistle and Rose) written to welcome Margaret Tudor
to Scotland, or his Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis, and in his satirical
poems like the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, remarkable for its
realism, and the Fenyeit Freir of Tungland. It is his linguistic and metrical
skill that distinguish him rather than any originality of thought or senti-
ment, even in his Lament for the Makeris, a melancholy lyric on death,
reviewing the poets of his country’s past. Gawin Douglas (c. 1475-c. 1522)
seems at first sight to have moved towards something less medieval, though
his early allegories, the Police of Honour (1501) and King Hart, better
for its brevity, are still in the old tradition. He is best remembered for the
first translation (apart from some fragments) into English of the Aeneid;
it is done in rhyming decasyllabics and aims at exactness, but the Virgilian
poetry hardly comes through, so that it is the poet’s own prologues to
each book which, written with spontaneity and colour, are most prized.
For all his medieval form and traditional framework, the writings of
Sir David Lyndsay fall outside our limits. There can be little doubt that
popular verse in the shape of ballads was circulating on both sides of the
Border, but it is impossible to pin them down to dates. It is as difficult
to date with precision as to composition or performance many of the
plays, religious and secular, which were played up and down the country.
The town-cycles were still popular and were to remain so. A number of
moralities date from the fifteenth century and follow the normal pattern.
The merits of Everyman are known to all. The Four Elements, printed
c. 1519, but surviving only in incomplete form, takes an interest in
science and the new discoveries.

There is little prose to mention strictly within our period. Serious
writing was still mainly in Latin ; the old romances circulated in chapbooks ;

190

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

the lively translation of Froissart’s Chronicles by Lord Berners (1467-1533)
and the same translator’s Huon de Bordeaux fall into a later decade, though
they look back to the Middle Ages. We must remember the popularity
of Malory’s Morte d' Arthur, printed in 1485 by Caxton, whose other
publications, like those of Wynkyn de Worde, kept alive much that was
best in the available literature of their time and, in translation, of classical
antiquity.

In the Scandinavian countries, as elsewhere, there was a background
of popular literature: folksongs and ballads, collected at a later time;
narrative poems on heroic, supernatural or amusing themes or, like the
Icelandic Ballad of Tristan, going back to the widespread ‘ Breton ’ matter ;
and in Iceland too the rimur, verse stories from the saga stock. The first
Danish book to be printed was the Rimkronicke (1495) attributed to the
monk Niels of Sorb. Swedish chronicles produced at about the same time
were the Nya Karlskronikan and the Sturerkronikorna (c. 1500). The
traditional narrative poems were also being rehandled in prose in Iceland.
Religious poetry was not lacking and produced new work like the three
sacred poems of Mikkel of Odense, The Rose Garland of Maiden Mary,
The Creation and Human Life, which appeared in 1514; while in Iceland
the last Catholic bishop of Holar, Jon Arsson, set up the first printing
press and wrote poems of piety, patriotism and polemic before he was
beheaded in 1550. In 1506 was printed a collection of Danish proverbs,
attributed to Peter Laala. In Sweden the Love Letters (1498) of Ingrid
Persdotter, a nun of Vadstena, to a young noble, are a touching departure
from current types. There is little precise evidence, but it is difficult to
believe that mysteries and moralities of the type so universal elsewhere
were not to be found in these countries.

Gaelic literature in Ireland and Scotland remained true to its ancient
traditions. The collection of texts went on in Ireland, together with con-
tinuations of the Ulster and Finn cycles, sometimes in ballad form;
chronicles, religious and devotional literature persisted, as did the trans-
lation and adaptation of stories taken in the Middle Ages from the classical
stock. In Scotland, where the literary language proper remained Irish,
like the basic verse technique, the outstanding document was the Book of
the Dean of Lismore, compiled in the early decades of the sixteenth century
by Sir James Macgregor and his brother; it contained poems by old and
recent poets including Campbell of Glenorchy (d. 1513) and some satire
on women. ‘Ossianic’ ballads were also collected. But the great period
of Scottish Gaelic dates from the Forty-Five.

Brythonic Celtic literature shows more advance. Brittany was under
French influence and French works were translated and adapted. In 1499
appeared the first book printed in Breton, the Catholicon of Jean Lagadeuc,
who had compiled this Breton-Latin-French dictionary some thirty years
earlier. In 1519 the Mellezour an Maru (Mirror of Death) was composed,

191 13-3

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

a long poem of over three thousand verses, on Death and the Last Things ;
it was not printed till 1575. From the early sixteenth century come two
verse mysteries, the Buhez Santez Nonn (Life of St Non), adapted from a
Latin life and localised in Brittany, and the Burzud Bras Jezuz (Great
Miracle of Jesus), which is in the line of the French mysteries. Devotional
literature drew on the Golden Legend for matter. In Cornwall religious
drama continued. The Pascon Agan Arluth (Passion of Our Lord) was a
tedious play based on gospels canonical and apocryphal. It dates from
the fifteenth century as do the Ordinalia, three religious plays, in varied
metres, on the Creation, the Passion and the Resurrection; in spite of
some comic scenes, the general effect is poor, the dialogue inert. Of the
same general type is the Beunans Meriasek (Life of St Meriasek), which
runs to nearly 5000 lines, varied in metre and in tone, full of anachronisms
and loose in structure; this play, of Breton origin but interlarded with
English words, was written down, if not composed, by ‘Dominus Hadton’
in 1504. In Wales, as in Ireland and Scotland, the Age of the Bards was
by no means over. The Welsh bards proper were highly respected, proud
of their craft and of their position in society, but there existed a rabble of
self-styled bards who were little better than wandering beggars and who
had become a menace, social, political and artistic. The great Carmarthen
Eisteddfod of 1451 tried to deal with the situation but only succeeded in
tightening the rules of versification into a strict code with the usual results.
While disciples of the freer style of Dufydd ap Gwilym were still found,
the more formal poetry prevailed at the end of the century with Dufydd
ap Edmwnd (d. c. 1480) and his disciples, particularly Tudur Aled, whose
sententious verse was long remembered. A number of poets sang the
praises of Henry Tudor even before he won the English throne, while the
topicality of this lively Welsh verse has an example in the bitter satire by
Lewis Glyn Cotti (d. 1490) against the men of Chester. Outside the
continuation of the gnomic triads, prose appears to have been at a stand-
still. The first book in Welsh was printed only in the middle of the sixteenth
century.

Outside western Europe proper, the Renaissance as we know it had
little effect, though young Polish nobles were sometimes educated in
Italy. The general tradition in the Slav world remained that of Byzantium
and of local matter. There is one notable exception, the Catholic Slavs of
western Serbia and Dalmatia, who formed, particularly in Ragusa, a
society which looked to Venice and Italy, and to which, earlier, Greek
scholars had fled from Constantinople. Sisko Mencetic (1457-1527) and
Djordje Drzic (1461-1501), in their love-poems and elegies, were in the line
of Ovid and of Petrarch. These poets at any rate should be included in
our survey.

To summarise this complex account is not easy, but in the welter of
promise and accomplishment, backwardness and conservatism, the unique

192

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE ARTS IN WESTERN EUROPE

position of Italy shines out. Italy indeed was to serve for many years as
a pattern and guide. Nowhere else, in spite of the achievements of a
Rojas or a Brant, a Dunbar or a Lemaire de Beiges, a Commynes or a
Montalvo, were the Middle Ages so far outstripped and left behind. The
full impact of the revival of ancient learning (even in Italy itself) and of
the Italian example was yet to reach the rest of Europe and then usually
modified and in some cases limited by the effect of the Lutheran and
Calvinist Reformations.

193

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER VII

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

O n 19 August 1493 the old emperor Frederick III died. His long
reign, ever since 1440, had been marked by a rising consciousness
of German nationality. This had been nourished by the contro-
versies of the conciliar period, stimulated by the invention of printing
amongst an increasingly wealthy and German-reading public in the courts
and towns, and expressed in the newly current phrase ‘ The Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation’. But the reign had witnessed territorial
losses on all sides. The estates of Holstein had accepted the rule of the
Danish king (1460). The Teutonic Order had come under the control of
Poland (1466). The Austrian duchies were overrun at intervals by the
Turks. The Swiss had ceased to regard themselves as having duties to
the Reich. On the collapse of the Burgundian power (1477) the French
monarchy resumed its efforts at eastward expansion ; and French diplo-
macy stimulated centrifugal movements from the Netherlands to the Alps.
Frederick’s son, Maximilian, took over a Reich diminished and threatened.

Indignation was felt at the helplessness of the Reich. But what could
be done? Machiavelli wrote truly ‘Of the power of Germany none can
doubt, for it abounds in men, riches and arms. . . .But it is such as cannot
be used’. 1 The supreme authority was the king acting with the advice and
consent of the Reichstag, the assembly of his estates or direct tenants.
At full strength it could consist of the six electors, some 120 prelates,
about thirty lay princes and 140 counts and lords, and eighty-five towns.
But the list was confused and untrustworthy; and from any Reichstag
many estates were absent. Others were represented by envoys who might
prove not to have full powers to bind their principals. Many towns,
nobles and the subordinate rural population were unrepresented. Certain
points of Reichstag procedure had been established. The king made his
proposals and then withdrew. Electors, princes and towns separated for
discussion. The elector of Mainz then presided over a joint session and
conveyed an agreed answer to the king. An agreement of king and estates
became law. But the medieval principle that new obligations could not
be imposed on a man without his own consent died hard. Moreover,
those who had assented to a proposal at a Reichstag often postponed its
fulfilment till the need for it had passed. Reichstag after Reichstag had
met during Frederick’s reign. Schemes for settling disputes and main-
taining the peace for limited periods had been drawn up and pompously

1 Ritratto delle cose della Magna ; see Machiavelli’s Works, ed. G. Mazzoni and
M. Casella (1929), pp. 740, 742, or ed. M. Bonfantini (1954), pp. 487, 491.

194

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

announced. They had produced little effect beyond stimulating thought
and demands for order. Germany remained a mass of greater and smaller
powers. Her people looked to their local ruler as the last word of power.
But only in the greater principalities and larger towns could they have
confidence that their ruler’s power would normally suffice to uphold order
and provide defence.

In France and England the Church inculcated obedience in temporal
matters to the royal authority and often acted as an instrument of royal
policy in spiritual affairs. But over a hundred German prelates, from the
three Rhenish archbishop-electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, down to
abbots and provosts, especially in the south and west, were themselves
temporal rulers, mostly members of princely families and sharing the
princely political outlook. Such prelates habitually accumulated benefices.
Thus Count George of the Palatinate, on becoming bishop of Speyer,
obtained from the Holy See in 1513 permission to remain dean of Mainz,
a canon of Cologne and of Trier, provost of St Donatian at Bruges, parish
priest of Hochheim and of Lorch am Rhein. Albert von Hohenzollern,
brother of the elector of Brandenburg, on his election to the archbishopric
of Mainz in 1514, was allowed to retain another archbishopric, Magde-
burg, with the see of Halberstadt. Preoccupied with matters of wealth
and power, such prelates were little concerned with the spiritual welfare
of their flocks. Some of them rarely performed any sacerdotal functions.
An extreme case was that of Rupert von Simmem, who, as bishop of
Strassburg from 1440 to 1478, never once said mass, and received the
sacrament once a year, like the laity.

Nevertheless, the Church was fulfilling a great task of civilisation, of
spreading among the Germans the virtues of duty, goodwill and humility.
Her stability appeared imposing. Her courts administered her law and their
decisions were effective. Education was still almost wholly in her hands.
The piety of the Germans overflowed lavishly into charitable and religious
foundations. Artists and craftsmen adorned her cathedrals, churches
and religious houses. Pilgrimages attracted many thousands, eager to
venerate relics or to gain indulgences, the proceeds of some of which
supported various forms of social service.

But the general acceptance of tradition was accompanied by the rising
indignation of many orthodox reformers at the lack of discipline and
education among the clergy, and by the impatience of much bourgeois
opinion with ecclesiastical power. There was also much discontent among
the clerical ‘proletariat’. Thousands of the secular clergy were miserably
paid vicars of beneficed superiors occupied elsewhere, or had no cure of
souls and lived by saying masses at particular altars or picking up other
pious jobs for small fees. Attached to two parish churches of Breslau
there were, at the end of the fifteenth century, 236 clergy. 1 Despite
1 J. Lortz, Die Reformation in Deutschland, vol. i, p. 86.

195

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

repeated and partially successful efforts at reform, there were many
inefficient and unspiritual religious houses; and there was a horde of
wandering mendicants, some of them impostors belonging to obscure or
non-existent brotherhoods. And the country was filled with wealthy
monasteries, and with collegiate foundations whose members, mostly not
in priest’s orders and drawn exclusively from noble families ( Gottesjunker ,
as they were called), were indistinguishable from their fighting, hunting
elder brothers, except for their unmarried status. An orderly, peaceful,
Christian society could not develop while so many persons with no Christian
aspirations were included in the clerical order. There were no seminaries.
Only clerks in search of benefices and regulars attended the universities.
Few of the clergy received any theological, pastoral or devotional
training. And no bishop took the fundamental problem of clerical
education in hand.

In these circumstances the great demand for books of popular religion
and the score of editions of the Bible printed in German, before Luther’s
time, were viewed with not unnatural concern. The numerous publica-
tions in defence of human free will, the foundation of the Church’s
doctrine of man, show that it was being questioned. The great preacher
of Strassburg, Geiler von Kaisersberg, said that it was as dangerous to
leave the common man to make what he could of the Bible as to put a
carving knife into the hands of a small child and tell him to cut the
bread. Archbishop Berthold of Mainz’s prohibition of the unauthorised
printing and sale of vernacular works on religion was caused by
similar misgivings. If revolt against the Church’s teaching remained,
outside Bohemia, on a very small scale, being either obscure or confined
to a few virtually pagan humanists, the way for that revolt was being
prepared.

Such reform as was authoritatively imposed came not from the in-
different prelates but from lay rulers. Earnest reformers among the clergy,
losing confidence in their own order and in distant Rome, and fearing
the growth of anti-clericalism, turned to their prince for support. It
became not unusual for princes to issue instructions on ecclesiastical
matters, and to reform or suppress ecclesiastical foundations. And towns
were increasingly taking over activities hitherto the province of the clergy,
such as hospitals, schools, the control of morals, even the control of churches
and abbeys. It is noticeable that of the twenty pre-Reformation German
universities, eighteen were founded either by lay princes or by town
councils; whereas only two, and those the least considerable, Mainz and
Wurzburg, were founded by spiritual authorities.

This process of increasing lay control of the Church could, however,
only be applied by the powerful. It helped to consolidate the increasing
power and wealth of the few great princely families which in the decade
1495-1504 aspired to share the control of the Reich, and of the more

196

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

numerous principalities which, together with a few great towns, also
emerged as virtually independent states in the sixteenth century.

Economic changes were breaking the medieval rhythm of German life.
German merchants learned Italian methods of large-scale capitalism. The
generation before Luther saw the rise of the new power of the great
capitalists, organising the production of the precious metals and industrial
material and controlling prices. Rulers pursued dynamic policies of
expansion, by purchase, by bribing ministers of other Powers or by war.
And war was being increasingly waged with mercenary professional
soldiers, who would desert if their pay was not punctually forthcoming.
Cash was in great demand, and the capitalists would provide it, in return
for productive monopolies which they could turn to advantage. A re-
markable example of monopolistic power is afforded by the arrangement,
towards the end of Maximilian’s reign, between the firms of Fugger, then
the controllers of the Hungarian copper mines, and of Hochstetter, who
dealt largely in Tirolese copper. By it the copper markets of north Italy
and south Germany were to be supplied exclusively from Tirol, while
the Netherlands were to be supplied from Hungary. Among the results
of the general economic disturbance were the depression of the old
corporations of small-scale producers, increased specialisation due to
new inventions, the growth of an industrial proletariat of wage-earners,
and a rapid increase in wealth and culture amongst the more successful
bourgeoisie. This in turn stimulated the smaller rural nobility to increase
the burdens on their unfree tenants and to deprive them of common
rights, as the only means, in addition to robbery with violence, of enabling
themselves to emulate the style of life of the wealthy townsmen. No
decade passed without a serious peasant revolt somewhere in southern
Germany; and the resultant repression often added to the authority of a
neighbouring territorial prince, when he proved to be the only power
capable of dealing with the outbreak.

Another influence making for change was the diffusion of the Roman
law, a victory of the intellectuals at the expense of the people. German
laws were local and various. There was no central source of German law.
The Roman law cut a clear and consistent path, favourable to authority
and wealth, through the jungle. Its prestige was high at a time when
Roman antiquity was almost worshipped in humanistic circles. Civilian
lawyers, trained in the universities of Italy and Germany, were increasingly
used by princes as administrators, judges and arbitrators. In the Reichs-
kammergericht (the supreme court of the Empire), established in 1495,
half of the judges were to be civilian lawyers. Thereafter the foreign,
authoritarian law, which treated the monarch as the source of all rights,
flowed more rapidly into the justice and administration of the territories,
to the advantage of regular, systematic government. But the central

197

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

authority derived no benefit therefrom. The princes, while concerned to be,
each in his own territory, the Roman law’s sovereign source of authority,
insisted on their feudal, traditional, relation to the emperor.

At the close of the fifteenth century the triumph of the greater princes
was as yet by no means assured. The larger towns, the chief centres of
wealth, were still strong enough to defend themselves and, if they had to
choose, preferred effective imperial government to princely rule. In the
south-west the Swabian League of princes, prelates, counts, knights and
towns, with regular meetings, tribunals and a minimum common force of
12,000 foot and 1200 horse, did much to maintain the peace and defend
the existing order in an area where the idea of the Reich was strongest,
but the division of actual power was greatest. Brought into existence in
1488 by the alarm of the Swabian estates at the growing ‘revolutionary’
power of the Swiss and the aggressive policy of the Wittelsbach dukes of
Bavaria, the League provided an example of a union which demanded
considerable sacrifices of autonomy from its members. Maximilian and
Berthold of Mainz both adhered to the League and each tried to gain its
support for his conception of the Reich. In its earlier years the League
did support Berthold’s efforts for reform, but after the peace of 1499 with
the Swiss and the defeat of the Wittelsbachs in 1504, the original purpose
of the League, the maintenance of the status quo in the south-west, was
achieved. By that time the reform movement was dead. And after the
death of Eberhard of Wurttemberg (1496) the League enjoyed no purpose-
ful and generally accepted leadership. It was still strong enough in 1519
to overthrow the ambitious Ulrich of Wurttemberg, whose territory it sold
to Charles V. But its members tended to claim the benefits of the League,
without vigorously fulfilling its obligations. The religious revolution
further divided it, and gradually it broke down.

Ecclesiastically, economically, politically, socially, Germany was in
confusion and undergoing rapid change. There was a great longing for
order, peace and security, and for a leader who should fulfil this longing;
for an emperor who, according to a widespread apocalyptic tradition,
would appear and restore the Golden Age. And to large circles of German
opinion Maximilian, king of the Romans since i486 and, with his father’s
death, sole ruler of the Reich and of the Habsburg dominions, appeared
to be the God-given leader. For Maximilian had qualities that appealed
to all classes of his people. He was 34 years of age; of magnificent
appearance ; a great gentleman, genial and at his ease with all, princes,
churchmen, knights, ladies, merchants, peasants ; an athlete and a moun-
taineer, superb in the lists and in the chase; a scholar and a poet, the patron
of humanists and artists ; a skilful commander in war, the organiser of
the German infantry, the Landsknechte, and expert in the technicalities
of artillery. He had beaten off the French from the Netherlands in 1479,
and as recently as January 1493, with inadequate forces, he had delivered

198

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

western Germany from the prospect of French invasion by his victory at
Salins, followed by the Peace of Senlis in May. Three years before, by
acquiring Tirol and ejecting the Hungarians from Lower Austria, he had
reunited all the Habsburg lands under his father and himself. At the
moment of his succession to sole rulership, he was covered with glory and
popular approval.

But Maximilian had already had experience of the baffling difficulties
which beset a German king, and these, together with his own inability to
estimate realistically the possibilities open to him, made his reign one of
frustration, disappointment and failure. In an age of growing armed
autocracies, France, Spain, the Ottoman empire, he rightly perceived the
dangers to which a disunited Germany was exposed. ‘ Unite under your
king, defend Germany against France and the Turks, or perish’ was his
constant theme, eloquently propounded to the Reichstag , to the leading
princes, or to assemblies of towns. He failed to persuade the estates,
and the history of Germany for the next three centuries confirmed his
warnings.

In opposition to Maximilian’s efforts to create a strong monarchy, free
to impose taxation and maintain a standing army, support for an alter-
native reform of the Reich was organised by Berthold of Henneberg,
archbishop of Mainz, arch-chancellor of the empire and chairman of the
Electoral College. It is evidence of his great abilities and tenacity of pur-
pose that he was able to convert his electoral colleagues, and such good
friends of Maximilian as Albert of Saxe-Meissen and Eberhard of Wiirt-
temberg, to his views; so that for about a decade they presented a more
or less united front. Berthold represented the aristocratic constitutionalism
of the later Middle Ages. He and his colleagues demanded effective
organs of central government as the essential remedy for the anarchy in
Germany. But the supreme central authority must be composed of a
group of the greater princes, in which the electors, with their tradition and
experience of co-operation, should take the lead as the councillors of the
Crown. The reformers’ aim amounted to a federal Reich, in which the
great princes, each autonomous in the affairs of his own territory, should
act with the Crown as a government for common affairs. And whatever
armed forces the Reich might have should be used for the maintenance
of domestic order. Foreign war must be avoided, to give the new in-
stitutions the possibility of acceptance and growth during a period of
peace. Accordingly they refused to entrust Maximilian with the dis-
cretionary control of troops and money, and with the decision of war
and peace, which he maintained to be his right. They had seen his adven-
tures on the periphery of the Reich in quest of objects that might increase
the power of Habsburg, but seemed remote from central German interests.
As regent of the Netherlands for his son Philip, he had exasperated the
Flemish towns with his French war, and an imperial army had had to

199

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

deliver him from imprisonment by the burghers of Bruges (1488). Two
years later he had secretly married Anne, duchess of Brittany, by proxy,
a mad scheme intended to enable him to attack France from the rear,
just when he was fully occupied, with inadequate resources, in asserting
his family’s claim to the contingent succession in Hungary. Neither his
father nor the Reichstag had supported him in either project.

In the summer of 1493 Maximilian’s mind was turned once more to
the east. The Turks had appeared in Croatia and southern Styria, and
Maximilian went to Graz to organise defence. The west was calm, after
the Treaty of Senlis. Maximilian’s Statthalter in the Netherlands, Albert
of Saxe-Meissen, had reduced the Flemish towns to obedience — so
successfully that for 300 years they remained loyal to Habsburg— and in
August 1494 he handed over his authority to the young Duke Philip.
A gateway for French advance into Germany in the lower Rhineland
seemed to have been closed. Indeed Charles VIII of France seemed to
share Maximilian’s dream of a united European crusade against Islam.

In September 1494 came the French invasion of Italy. Maximilian did
not oppose it. On the contrary, it seems certain that his negotiations with
Charles included an arrangement that, in return for his acquiescence in
the French conquest of Naples, Charles would support him against
Venice, the constant object of Maximilian’s resentment, the filcher during
the past century of much imperial territory. In this early rehearsal of the
League of Cambrai of 1509 the two kings would divide the control of
Italy. 1 To further this project of imperial revival in Italy, Maximilian
entered into close relations with Ludovico il Moro, regent of Milan,
investing him with the dukedom and marrying his niece, Bianca Maria
Sforza, in return for 440,000 very welcome ducats. With French and
Milanese support he would expel the Serene Republic from the mainland,
which should be restored to the Reich. And then from the Adriatic for
a great Balkan expedition for the deliverance of the east. He was still
indulging these hopes when, on 24 November 1494, he summoned the
Reichstag to meet, with armed contingents, at Worms on 2 February 1495.
His immediate purpose was the journey to Rome, accompanied by a
German host, for his imperial coronation. In the summer the Turkish
crusade might follow.

But the complete and unexpected French success in Italy spread general
alarm. Spain, Venice, the pope and Milan quickly drew together in
resistance. Maximilian resented Charles’s disregard of imperial rights in
central Italy and the rumour that Charles proposed to reform the Holy
See and even to obtain the imperial crown. Nevertheless it was only
earnest warnings from Ferdinand of Spain of the danger of a French
domination of Italy and the offer of a double marriage of Maximilian’s

1 Such is the view of Ulmann in his Kaiser Maximilian I, vol. 1, p. 271 ; and of Kaser,
Deutsche Ceschichle, 1486-1 519, p. 55.

200

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

children, Philip and Margaret, to Juana and Juan of Spain, that induced
Maximilian, by February 1495, to join the League of Venice for the
expulsion of the French from Italy.

The League’s half-hearted performance against the French army at
Fomovo in July 1495 was weakened by the absence of the German
contingent. Why was not Maximilian there, and in command of the
League’s forces? He was held down at Worms by the Reichstag's resistance
to his demands for supply. He had expected the assembly to last for a
couple of weeks. It lasted for twenty-six. For Maximilian wanted a
considerable force. Berthold of Mainz and the reformers saw their
opportunity to insist on those constitutional reforms which Maximilian
in 1489 and 1491 had promised to promote — a supreme court of justice
and the permanent prohibition of private war — and to add further
measures. Maximilian eloquently addressed the estates on the dangers of
a French control of Italy, of French attacks from the south as well as the
west, in addition to the constant threat of Turkish invasion. He demanded
the money for an Italian campaign forthwith and further sums for the
maintenance of an army for ten or twelve years. Each side admitted the
strength of the other’s argument. It was a question of priorities. The
reformers argued that a coherent, working system of law and order was
Germany’s first necessity. They presented a scheme. It included the former
demands, but also a permanent supreme executive council ( Reichsrat )
of seventeen, without whose consent royal acts would be invalid, to
provide for defence and internal peace, to carry out decisions of the
court and to control royal revenue. The king should be represented by
the president, each of [the six electors should nominate one councillor,
the spiritual princes four, the temporal princes four, and the towns two.
Matters of importance, including foreign relations and new taxes, would
be referred to the king (if he were available) and the electors.

Moved by the news of the virtual French victory at Fomovo, the
Reichstag agreed to a scheme of general taxation, the Common Penny,
to provide an army for defence, and an immediate loan from the towns
of 150,000 gulden and a further sum of 150,000 gulden from those who
were prepared to make an advance payment on account of the Common
Penny. But the argument over the other measures went on till August.
There was even a proposal for a German Church, not controlled from
Rome. The great point of difference was the Reichsrat. The king would
not consent to being reduced to the status of an executive officer of a
commission controlled by the electors. Few of the estates liked it. Some,
like the Wittelsbachs, openly opposed it. So the Reichsrat was dropped.
But Berthold insisted that some representative organ of executive govern-
ment was essential. So it was finally provided that to the Reichstag itself,
meeting annually or in extraordinary sessions, should be entrusted the
ordering of measures for the maintenance of the peace, the expenditure

201

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

of the Common Penny, the conduct of foreign policy, the decision on war
and peace. Thus an institution of long-proved incapacity for decisive
action was made the supreme executive power.

The Public Peace was declared permanent. That was something achieved.
The effectiveness of the Peace, indeed, depended on the princes’ support
of collective security. It was still violated — some princes could not be
restrained, and the knightly highwaymen ( Raubritter ) could not for a
generation be brought to abandon their gangster way of life — but it was
less so than before. And the principle had been proclaimed that private
war was a crime. The Reichskammergericht, sitting at Frankfurt (in
Rhenish, electoral Germany, far from the Habsburg sphere of power),
was to apply the rule of law. The king was to nominate its president, who
would be assisted by eight nobles and eight doctors of law, approved by
the Reichstag. Maximilian duly inaugurated the court on 31 October,
and it was the one permanent institutional outcome of the Reichstag of
Worms. But it began feebly. It could not discipline the mighty. The
judges could not obtain their salaries, payable out of the Common Penny.
Suitors complained that without bribery they could get no attention.
In May 1497 the court moved to Worms, where life was cheaper.

The financial provision was a failure. The Common Penny, voted for
four years only, was to support an imperial army and the Reichskammer-
gericht and other expenses of government. It was to be paid to seven
treasurers, nominated by the king and the estates and stationed at Frank-
furt. These treasurers were to submit accounts annually to the Reichstag,
which would allocate expenditure. The great innovation, which stressed
the unity of the Reich, was that the tax, 2$ per cent of income or o- 1 per cent
of capital, was to fall directly on all persons over fifteen and capable of
paying and to be collected by parish priests, since it was primarily intended
for the Turkish crusade. It was a step towards true federal taxation,
although the estates were responsible for seeing that it was collected. It
was not a mere confederate demand addressed to rulers, who could raise
it as they pleased. But the money did not come in. Many princes, counts
and towns considered the tax an outrage. Many refused to take orders
from a Reichstag at which they had been neither present nor represented.
An assembly of Franconian knights declared that their duty was to fight,
not to pay, for the Reich. After two years only Mainz (of course) and
two other bishops, the elector of Brandenburg and two lesser princes,
and some towns of the south-west had paid up. Without money, without
coercive authority, the reforms of Worms were unworkable.

For the next four years Maximilian was engaged upon various enter-
prises, whose connecting thread was his continual contest with France.
The rumour that Charles VIII would shortly return to Italy seemed
confirmed when some French troops crossed the Alps early in 1496.
Ludovico of Milan, upon whom the blow might fall in the first instance,

202

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

persuaded the Venetians to join him in offering Maximilian a monthly
subsidy to become their condottiere and bring a German army into Italy.
To show the imperial flag in Italy, to eject the French, and then together
with Spain to invade France from the south, while the English should
invade it from the north, was now his grandiose plan. But his summons of
an imperial host to join him in July met with little response. No prince of
the empire came or approved of the expedition. He must, therefore, have
money with which to hire troops. The house of Fugger agreed to pay
121,600 gulden for a silver mining monopoly in Tirol. But that sum was
almost entirely swallowed by old debts and payments to his Tirolese
officials. Despite the Edict of Worms, he collected as much as possible of
the Tirolese share of the Common Penny, and crossed the Alps with a
small force of 4000 horse and foot, vainly hoping with the Italian subsidies
to hire an imposing contingent of Swiss. But it was now clear that there
was to be no French invasion of Italy, and the Venetians advised Maxi-
milian that he would do well not to proceed farther. He was not to be
restrained, however; and he appeared in Italy as the angel of deliverance
— whom nobody now wanted. Ludovico invented a task for him, the
deliverance of Pisa from Florentine attack. Maximilian accordingly laid
siege by sea and land to the Florentine port of Leghorn. Defeated there
by the autumn weather, and finding that the Venetian subsidy was not
forthcoming, Maximilian hastily abandoned his Italian plans and hurried
back to Germany, pursued by the mocking laughter of all Italy.

Yet while Maximilian was cutting so ridiculous a figure in Italy, there
occurred at Antwerp, on 21 October 1496, an event destined in the future
to raise the house of Habsburg almost to that European monarchy of
which he dreamed ; the marriage of his son, Philip of Burgundy, to Juana
of Spain.

From the summer of 1496 to that of 1498 Berthold of Mainz kept the
Reichstag in almost continuous session at Lindau, Worms and Freiburg-
im-Breisgau, struggling to persuade such estates as attended to abandon
their particularism in the common interest. Maximilian remained aloof,
engaged in organising the administration of his Tirol. The Reichstag
discussed and agreed on sumptuary and temperance regulations. At last,
in June 1498, Maximilian appeared at Freiburg. Charles VIII had died
suddenly, and Louis of Orleans was king of France. Maximilian was
already organising a preventive war, before Louis could be secure on his
throne. Ducal Burgundy should be recovered and France’s satellites
along the Rhine prevented from defying the Reich. Bitterly he broke out
to a group of princes: ‘By the Lombards I am betrayed. By the Germans
deserted. But I will not let myself again be bound hand and foot as at
Worms.. . .1 must and will make war.. . .This must I say, even should
I have to throw the crown at my feet and stamp upon it. n

1 Kaser, op. cit. p. 77; cf. Ulmann, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 592.

203

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The Reichstag could see no sense in the war. But king and estates came
to terms. The Common Penny had been coming in better, and a small
amount was appropriated for the war. Maximilian confirmed the Edict
of Worms. But Maximilian’s war petered out. Louis, preparing for the
conquest of Milan, was content to remain on the defensive in Burgundy,
while he skilfully dissolved the Italian League and established friendly
relations with Venice and Spain, made a treaty of friendship with Maxi-
milian’s son, Philip, at Brussels, negotiated with the Swiss, and stimulated
Charles of Egmond, the deposed, but defiant, duke of Guelders, to activity.
Maximilian was engaged in dealing with Guelders in February 1499, when
he heard that all along the Swabian-Swiss border war had broken out.

The Swiss Confederation then consisted of the original forest cantons,
Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden; two other rural cantons, Zug and Glarus;
the town-dominated cantons of Berne, Lucerne and Zurich; and the post-
1477 accessions of Fribourg and Solothum. There were also areas under
the joint lordship of two or more cantons, as well as associated Alpine
communities and allied towns. Annual or more frequent diets of repre-
sentatives of the ten peasant and burgher republics provided some central
control and common policy.

Guicciardini described the Swiss as ‘fierce and rustic; pastoral rather

than agricultural, because of the barrenness of their country This

fierce and primitive people have won great renown by their union and
feats of arms, for by their natural ferocity and military discipline they
have always bravely defended their own country and won great fame
fighting in foreign service.’ 1 During the transition from feudal to profes-
sional armies, from the dominance of the mounted knight to the new
power of fire-arms, the disciplined valour of the Swiss made war their
national industry. Apart from the modest returns on their cattle-breeding,
the Swiss derived some profit from the transit of goods through their
centrally-placed territory and from the industries of Zurich and Berne.
These resources they augmented by pay and loot in foreign military
service, which the young men enjoyed. Other motives also, a threat to
their independence, the defence of the Church, the arguments of leaders
who knew something of Europe and had been adequately bribed, would
suffice to send a force of these magnificent fighters into action. Of foreign
Powers the best paymasters had been the kings of France, so that in the
later fifteenth century Swiss troops had been an almost permanent
instrument of French policy, to the indignation of German opinion. On
occasions the response of the Swiss could be embarrassing; as when
Charles VIII sent agents from Turin to recruit 1 2,000 Swiss in August 1495.
Double that number came, and the passes had to be manned to prevent
women and children from coming to earn French gold.

The weakness of the Swiss was disunity, the mutual distrust of the
1 Guicciardini, Storia d’ltalia, book x.

204

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

rural and urban cantons, the rivalries of Berne, Zurich and Lucerne,
family and personal feuds. The Burgundian wars and their aftermath
had increased the hegemony of Berne, brought a considerable French-
speaking population under Swiss control, and given rise to disputes over
the profits. Only by long negotiations and compromise was civil war
avoided in 1481. A period of peace followed, during which Hans Wald-
mann, burgomaster of Zurich (1483-9), with the help of the artisans’
guilds, became virtual dictator of his canton and aimed at a closer Swiss
union in resistance to what he considered the Habsburg danger from the
east. His arrest and execution by his opponents left the Swiss with no
unifying control.

A permanent bond between the Swiss and their associated communities
to the east was hatred of Habsburg. Arising from memories of past
struggles, it was kept alive by the Habsburg possession of Tirol and many
lands in Swabia, Alsace and Burgundy. And ever since 1438 the head of
the Reich had been a Habsburg. The Reich’s authority had indeed been
allowed to lapse. And the Swiss were quick to resent any revival of it, for
behind it would lie Habsburg interests and the feudal conceptions from
which they had successfully liberated themselves. The creation of the
Swabian League was ill received by the Swiss, who saw in it a Habsburg-
contrived barrier to their own expansion. Insults and opprobrious
epithets were habitually flung to and fro across the Rhine and the
situation on that border was always explosive.

The reforms of the Reich agreed at Worms in 1495 might have received
Swiss approbation, if the reforming oligarchs had given the well-organised
Swiss republics a place in their councils. As it was, the Swiss would have
none of them. What did they care for a Reichstag in which the voice of
the peasant was not heard? They, whose arbitral tribunals operated
satisfactorily, had no use for the Reichskammergericht. As for paying the
Common Penny, to be used by a Habsburg king and the electors, it was
out of the question. The reformers of the Reich were trying to convert a
long inoperative suzerainty into effective sovereignty. The Swiss not only
rejected it, but magnet-like attracted to their system one neighbour after
another, who wished to avoid imperial obligations.

In October 1496 an adverse sentence of the Reichskammergericht
against the Swiss town of St Gall was angrily rejected. During 1497 the
Swabian League and the Swiss began to sharpen their swords and pikes.
In 1498 Louis XII’s agents were active among the Swiss, distributing
money and arguments against the Reich, so that Ludovico of Milan
should receive no support from north of the Alps. The spark that exploded
the accumulated powder was an obscure dispute between Tirol and the
Grauer Bund, a community of the high Alps round the Engadine. The
Graubiindner summoned Swiss help, Tirol appealed to the Swabian
League. In February 1499 war flared up along the Rhine from Basle to

l6 205 NCUM1

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Feldkirch. It was a savage, shapeless war of small, heroic fights and much
plunder and destruction. To defend their liberty the Swiss fought with a
solidarity and loyalty that was lacking on the Swabian side, where some
knights refused to fight the ‘contemptible bumpkins’.

The Swiss explosion was highly distasteful to Maximilian. It was not
his war. The Swiss were the finest soldiers in Europe and he constantly
needed their services. If only he could get their military support, their
de facto independence might well be ignored. This civil war could bring
little gain and must cause the loss of much German manpower. However,
he could not avoid his duty as head of the Reich. He nominated his
brother-in-law, Albert of Bavaria, as temporary commander-in-chief, to
the disgust of many Swabian knights who would not serve under a Bavarian.
He himself came slowly south to the lake of Constance, and worked out
a plan for the encirclement of the Swiss. Before it could be carried out,
disaster occurred. The German right wing, a force of 16,000 men, was
surprised and wiped out at Domach, near Basle, on 22 July. The Swiss
victory was decisive. The war, estimated to have cost 20,000 dead and
200 castles and villages destroyed, was ended by negotiation and the
Peace of Basle, 22 September 1499.

The peace effected no change in the territorial status quo ; and the main
issue, the claims of the Reich to authority over the Swiss, was passed over
in silence. But actions begun in the courts of the Reich against the Swiss
were to be abandoned. Maximilian thus accepted the fact of Swiss inde-
pendence. And in 1508, when bargaining for Swiss troops, he formally
emancipated the confederation and its members from the jurisdiction of
the courts of the Reich.

After the war the Swiss further consolidated their position. In 1501
Basle and Schaffhausen, key positions on the Rhine, were admitted as
full members of the confederation. It was perhaps as an offset to this
increase of the urban element that the rural district of Appenzell was
admitted as a sovereign canton in 1513. The achievement of security was
also followed by expansion southwards. In 1500 Ludovico Sforza
recovered Milan from the French with the help of 8000 hastily recruited
Swiss. But a French army, with a larger force of Swiss, recruited with
the approval of the Swiss diet, appeared in Lombardy. The two bodies
of Swiss met at Novara. Ludovico’s Swiss, already disappointed of
immediate payment and plunder, refused to fight their countrymen and
marched off home ; and Milan was once more in Louis’s hands. Disputes,
however, arose between the French king and his Swiss allies over freedom
of trade with Milan and the possession of Bellinzona, long promised to
the forest cantons. Early in 1503 a Swiss force crossed the St Gotthard,
and Louis, preoccupied with Naples, surrendered the coveted district to
the forest cantons, which thus acquired permanent control of an Italian-
speaking area.

206

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

Meanwhile some of the soberer leaders of the confederation had
become convinced of the dangers of foreign military service to the true
interests of their people. A diet of all twelve cantons agreed at Baden,
on 21 July 1503, to renounce foreign military service and the acceptance
of pensions and other inducements to recruiting. But the diet had
imperfect control of the cantons, as the cantons had of their citizens.
The act of renunciation remained an aspiration.

Till 1510 the Swiss held more or less consistently to their French alliance.
But Pope Julius II determined to use them for the expulsion of the French
from Italy. His agent, Matthias Schinner, owed his elevation to the
bishopric of Sion to his prominence in the German, anti-French party in
the Valais. The military service of the pope appeared highly respectable,
and on 14 March 1510 a diet of all the cantons at Lucerne authorised a
treaty, by which for five years the Swiss should provide 6000 men, on
demand, for the service of the Holy See, and each canton should receive
1000 gulden annually. The treaty was soon more than fulfilled. Swiss
indignation was aroused by Louis XH’s refusal of an increase in his
regular payments to the Swiss, by his enlistment of German Landsknechte
and by his schismatic Council of Pisa. In the summer of 1512 over 12,000
Swiss came down the Adige and swept the French out of Italy. It was
the supreme moment of the Swiss in power politics. All the Alpine
passes from the St Bernard to the Stilfserjoch were now under their control.
Lugano and Locarno were held by the forest cantons; Chiavenna and the
Valtelline by the Grauer Bund. The restoration of the Sforza to Milan,
with a Swiss guarantee, suggested that the great Lombard duchy was
coming under a Swiss protectorate.

Further triumphs followed in 1513. Louis XII’s effort to recover Milan
was decisively defeated by the Swiss at Novara in June. While the English
invaded northern France, a large Swiss army advanced into ducal
Burgundy. Dijon capitulated on terms which included the definitive
evacuation of Lombardy by the French and a payment of 400,000
crowns to the Swiss. Exultantly the mountaineers returned home, with-
out waiting for the ratification of the treaty; which Louis repudiated.

Francis I made it his first business in 1515 to recover Milan. Massi-
miliano Sforza appealed to his guarantors. Swiss counsels were divided.
The francophiles and the neutralists reasserted themselves. The western
cantons marched indeed, but allowed themselves to be bought off by
Francis. The army of the eastern cantons, in a bad tactical position at
Marignano, was completely defeated (13 September). The history of the
Swiss as a military Power came to an end. In 1516 some of the cantons
still sent men to serve Maximilian and the Sforza. But their pay was soon
in arrears; the French army included some of their countrymen; and
Francis was prepared to let the Swiss keep their acquisitions south of the
Alps. Accordingly the arguments prevailed that mercenary service bred

207 16-2

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

avarice and led to disputes and habits of violence and was too costly in
casualties for a small community, and that the better policy would be
neutrality with a powerful supporter. On 29 November 1516 the con-
federation entered into a ‘perpetual peace’ with France. Swiss forces
were never to be used against France ; and the king of France was authorised
to enlist up to 16,000 Swiss for defence only. The confederation also
received valuable economic preferences. Thus France became the ‘first
friend’ and adviser of the confederation. Thereafter the rarity of civil war
among the Swiss and the total absence of foreign war bear testimony to
the skill of French diplomacy. The Swiss were irretrievably lost to the
Reich and created their tradition of permanent neutrality.

During the Swiss war of 1499 Louis XII had crossed the Alps and
annexed the imperial fief of Milan. Would the Reichstag tolerate this
injury? It met at Augsburg on 10 April 1500, the day of Ludovico’s final
capture by the French. A much chastened Maximilian appeared. Since
1495 he had repeatedly disregarded the Edict of Worms and tried to
commit the Reich to war. He had fought Florence, France, Guelders
and the Swiss; and without success. He could argue that his failures were
due to lack of support from the estates, rendered more disastrous by a
constitutional experiment that did not work. The result was what he had
foretold in 1495, the French power to the south as well as the west of
Germany. While the French, Venetians and Turks pressed in on the
Reich, the German king had to cope with confusion, disobedience and
treachery. But the reformers were still strong and determined. To disarm
his opponents Maximilian himself proposed what he had rejected at
Worms, the appointment of a representative supreme Executive Council,
a Reichsregiment. Berthold and his colleagues went to work and produced
a scheme to be applied for the next six years. The Reichsregiment should
be composed of twenty-one members. The king or his deputy should
preside; two councillors would represent Austria and Burgundy; each
elector should appoint one councillor; and the remaining twelve would be
elected by the estates according to their ranks and representing six areas
( Kreise ) other than the Habsburg and electoral lands. Provision was made
for the inclusion of burghers, knights and doctors of law. One elector
should attend in person during each period of three months. He would
vote first, and countersign decisions. The seat of this Government was
to be Niimberg. Its members would be paid out of taxation approved
by the Reichstag. If neither the king nor his deputy appeared, the Regiment
should proceed with the business nevertheless. And the Regiment was to
take over virtually all the functions of the monarchy. Administration, the
management of finance, the reform of justice, the maintenance of order, the
conduct of foreign policy, the raising and even the command of the armed
forces, were all attributed to it. Its orders would go out in the name of

208

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

the king and with his seal. The Regiment would report annually to the
Reichstag, to which, at the end of six years, supreme power would revert.

To meet the needs of defence a new expedient was adopted. All should
contribute. The nobility would provide cavalry, while the princes would
tax their non-noble subjects for the provision of a militia. The expenses
of the Reichsregiment and Reichskammergericht would be met from the
contributions of the clergy and towns, who might be trusted to understand
the needs of these institutions. The scheme was a step back from federal
to confederate organisation, in that to the individual estates was left the
entire responsibility for raising the tax and the armed forces.

Thus Maximilian’s desire for an army of the Reich was to be fulfilled.
But at what a price! He was no longer king in any sense of the word that
he could admit. He had sunk into the formal president of a commission
dominated by Berthold and his electoral colleagues. In the affairs of the
Reich he had no veto and no freedom of action. Even the military com-
mand was transferred from him to Duke Albert of Bavaria. Maximilian
bowed to necessity. But he warned the Reichstag that, if things did not
now improve, he would not wait to be dethroned, but would take the
crown and smash it to pieces. Before the Reichstag dissolved he went off
to hunt chamois in Tirol.

The reformers were no more successful in conducting central govern-
ment than Maximilian, who now gave them no assistance. They would
not make peace with France by the surrender of Milan to Louis. But,
as they would not embark on war, they made no impression on Louis.
And the militia remained unformed. Berthold’s health was beginning to
suffer. The estates gave him little support. The sessions of the Regiment
were always badly attended. So little taxation came in that its members
could not recover their expenses, and in 1501 they tried, unsuccessfully,
to persuade Cardinal Peraudi, the papal legate, newly arrived to organise
the collection of alms in connection with the jubilee indulgence, to turn
over to them part of the proceeds. The Regiment was no more than a
fifth wheel, turning in the air.

And Maximilian was not slow to recover from his humiliations and
resume his freedom of action. He did his best to secure the payment to
him, as the commander of the coming crusade, of as much as possible of
the proceeds of the jubilee indulgence. In his own lands, he ordered the
retention of the indulgence monies pending his further instructions. In
defiance of the Reichsregiment he summoned the German princes to join
him, with armed contingents, on 1 June 1502, for the crusade. Berthold
responded by summoning a meeting of the electors to consider the king’s
violation of the edicts of Worms and Augsburg. In March 1502 Maximilian
demanded from Berthold, arch-chancellor of the empire, the surrender of
the imperial seal. That was virtually the end of the Reichsregiment.
The Reichskammergericht also ceased to function, since its members

209

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

remained unpaid and Maximilian had restored his own royal court with
judges nominated by himself. The electors assembled at Gelnhausen on
30 June and undertook to meet four times a year and to act as a govern-
ment of the Reich in disregard of the king. While Maximilian exchanged
a heated correspondence with Berthold, whom he openly accused to the
town council of Ulm of being in the pay of the king of France, Germany
sank into even greater than usual confusion and disturbance.

Maximilian was now engaged not in expensive operations of war, but
in tortuous diplomacy concerned with the dynastic possibilities of future
Habsburg greatness. His son, Philip, had become, through his wife,
Juana, the prospective ruler of Spain; and the complete victory of Spain
over France in southern Italy during 1503 strengthened the position of
Spain’s ally, Maximilian. On the other hand, Philip and his Flemish
councillors maintained friendly relations with France and Maximilian
was induced to be a party to a series of treaties with Louis XII, which
differed in various respects but repeatedly provided for the marriage of
Philip’s baby son, Charles, with Louis’s baby daughter, Claude. Although
the French and German kings trusted each other not at all, it appeared
possible that the Archduke Charles might one day become the ruler not
only of Spain, but of some, at least, of Louis’s possessions. By the Treaty
of Blois, in September 1504, Louis was to have Milan, for 200,000 ducats,
and undertook to interfere no more in the affairs of the Reich. If Louis
died sonless, Charles and Claude were to succeed to Milan, Blois and
Brittany. The following April Cardinal d’Amboise, on behalf of Louis,
did homage to Maximilian for Milan at Hagenau and was solemnly
invested. Despite the anarchy in Germany, Maximilian’s dreams of a
future universal monarchy of Habsburg were receiving encouragement.

Maximilian was also engaged in developing the monarchical adminis-
tration in his own lands. He often said that he would prefer to be duke
of Austria, which meant something, rather than a helpless German king.
While the reformers were reducing his authority in the Reich to nothing,
he sought the roots of power in Habsburg soil (p. 219).

He was also patiently, diligently active in building up support for
himself among the princes. His royal functions and dignity gave him
much influence over chapters, princely families and towns. He had
successfully arranged that many bishoprics should be filled with his
supporters. Among the secular princes he had been able, by grants of
fiefs, tolls and other rights, to create a party of adherents, in addition
to those whose tradition it was to support the emperor.

And Maximilian’s greatest asset was his personality. He was expert in
all the pursuits that appealed to the young, fighting, hunting nobles; his
praises were sung by writers, artists, preachers; he was a welcome guest
in the towns where he fascinated burgher society by his geniality, eloquence
and wide interests.

210

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

Finally his chief opponent, Berthold, without whose energy and devotion
to principle the movement for constitutional reform could have had no
success at all, was sinking in health and died on 21 December 1504.

The episode which suddenly changed the situation and gave Maximilian
a short period of triumph in the Reich was the war of the Landshut
succession. Duke George ‘the Rich’ of Bavaria- Landshut died without
a male heir on 1 December 1503. He had made a succession agreement
with his cousins, Dukes Albert and Wolfgang of Bavaria-Munich. But
by his will he bequeathed all his possessions to his daughter, Elizabeth,
wife of Rupert, son of the Elector Palatine. The will defied not only the
previous agreement, but also the imperial rights over an escheated fief.
And Maximilian could not willingly permit so considerable an accession
of strength to the Palatinate, the habitual satellite of France and his own
enemy. Accordingly Maximilian presided over his own royal court
(Hofkammergericht) at Augsburg, found legal flaws in the arguments of
both claimants to the succession and proposed partition. But the young
Rupert tried to effect a fait accompli by seizing the town of Landshut.
It was essential for Maximilian to suppress and punish this defiance of
his royal authority; and in the process he could retain some pickings for
Habsburg. He therefore pronounced the ban of the empire upon Rupert
on 23 April 1504. The Swabian League and many enemies of the Palatinate
took up arms for the king, and south Germany was devastated by war.
No support for the Palatinate was forthcoming from France, which
Maximilian's diplomacy had, for the moment, succeeded in neutralising.
The decisive engagement was Maximilian’s defeat of the Palatinate’s
Bohemian mercenaries near Regensburg on 12 September. He then
turned to protect his own interests in Tirol and besieged the fortress of
Kufstein, which held out for Rupert. After three weeks it surrendered.
The commander and seventeen of the garrison were hanged, as a warning
to rebels. And Maximilian had a valuable stronghold, at the northern
gate of Tirol, in his hands.

Victorious in the Bavarian war, Maximilian summoned the Reichstag
to Cologne for J une 1 505. It was his moment of glory. The electoral opposi-
tion had dissolved. Mainz and Trier were now his supporters. Cologne
had never been personally unfriendly to Maximilian, nor active in reform.
The young Elector J oachim of Brandenburg was himself arranging to spend
a year in Maximilian’s service. The defeated Philip of the Palatinate was
in no position to assert himself. Of the electors, who three years before
had proposed to conduct the government of the Reich, only Frederick of
Saxony remained to offer cautious resistance to any attempts at monarchical
power. Maximilian, on the other hand, enjoyed immense popularity and re-
spect. In April 1 505 the Venetian envoys reported home that ‘ His imperial
majesty is now a true emperor of the empire and ruler of Germany’. 1

1 Archiv f osterr. Gesch. vol. 66 (1885), p. 77.

21 1

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The Landshut succession was again submitted to Maximilian’s judgment.
He accorded the smaller part, north of the Danube, to Rupert’s three
sons, whose father had fallen in the course of the war; and the larger
share, south of the Danube, to the house of Munich; an arrangement
calculated to leave a permanent source of discord between the two
branches of the Wittelsbach family. The victor and judge took an ample
reward for his services. Maximilian rounded off his Tirol by annexing to
it Kufstein and the valleys south of it, while the Elector Palatine had to
surrender many towns and districts to Habsburg.

At Cologne Maximilian took up the task of providing the Reich with
organs of central government. Instead of floundering in the bog of
attempted government by discussion among the oligarchs, Germany
should have a strong monarchy. He brought forward proposals much like
those with which he had opposed Berthold’s suggested Reichsrat at Worms
in 1495. There should be a permanent Reichsregiment at Niimberg for the
next six years. It should consist of twelve members elected from the six
Kreise and invested with all the powers of the Reichstag. But the king
should at any moment be entitled to summon it to himself, and in
important matters of policy it was to carry out his orders. As some
provision that this executive council should not be the mere instrument
of the royal will, which it was evidently intended to be, Maximilian
undertook that in all cases of difference between himself and the council
he would call in the electors and other princes to share in the decision.
Maximilian also proposed to provide the Reich with what it had never
had, permanent armed contingents for the enforcement of the law. There
should be four marshals, for four areas of Germany, each commanding
a posse of twenty-five knights as a form of imperial police. This plan of
setting thieves to catch greater thieves was ingenious. The knights might
be expected to be glad of such employment and of the chance of disciplining
some princes; though it may be doubted whether such small forces of
knights would have been effective. The plan was not unnaturally rejected
by a Reichstag of princes.

Indeed the estates, if immensely respectful to their king, were in no
mood to reopen the discussion on reform. They were weary of the efforts
at constitution building. Courteously they assured Maximilian that he
had ruled nobly, honourably and well, and would know how to continue
doing so. They therefore did not wish to limit or define his powers. In
fact they had become aware that plans for the creation of a German state
were unrealistic. The princes would not accept the status of subjects of
a state however constitutional ; the king would not sink to the level of a
president of a federal republic. There was nothing for it but to go on with
the existing muddle rendered worse than ever by uncertainty on how much
of the Reichstag' s legislation of recent years could be supposed to be still
valid.

212

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

Maximilian's usual request, for money for war, this time to assert the
Habsburg claim of succession to the Hungarian Crown, should King
Wladislaw die without a male heir, against a movement of nationalistic
Magyar nobles (to be followed by the expedition to Rome for the imperial
coronation), was moderate and well received. He only asked for 4000
men from the Reich. He would supply 10,000 from his own lands. There
was no question of reviving the Common Penny in any form. A return
was made to the traditional and obsolete list ( matricula ) of the money
and men owed by each estate to the Reich.

The appearance of Maximilian’s almost entirely Austrian army in
Hungary, but much more the birth of a son, Lewis, to Wladislaw in
July 1506, led to an inconclusive peace (19 July). The hostile Magyar
nobles did not withdraw their oath to reject any non-Hungarian claimant
to the Crown (p. 222) ; but the Habsburg contingent right of succession,
should the Jagiello line fail of male heirs, was included in the settlement.

After Hungary, the coronation at Rome and the revival of the empire
in Italy. But while Maximilian’s fortunes in the Reich had improved, the
foreign situation had deteriorated. Louis XII had denounced the Treaty
of Blois, with its marriage of Charles and Claude, as was to be foreseen.
Louis and Ferdinand of Aragon were now allies, each dominating his
share of Italy. And in September 1506 the Archduke Philip, who had
succeeded Isabella as king of Castille, died. Ferdinand, who had married
a French wife, Louis’s niece, was once more ruler of all Spain and might
have a son, who would cut out Philip’s son, Charles, from the Spanish
succession. Maximilian was without allies, and the entrance to Italy was
blocked by France and Venice. He must appeal to a Reichstag for
adequate support.

At the Reichstag of Constance, in May 1507, Maximilian’s prestige
was still high. The apparent failure of his dynastic hopes in France and
Spain increased his popularity by relieving the estates of the fear of an
international Habsburg monarchy. Eloquently he invited the estates to
support the Reich. He asked for supply for 30,000 men and promised
that Lombardy and Venetia, when recovered for the Reich, should become
imperial domain, the empire’s treasure-house, to the great financial relief
of Germany. But the estates could only be moved to half measures. On
a serious war against France and Venice they would not embark. For the
Roman expedition they agreed to 3000 horse for six months and 120,000
gulden for 9000 foot, on the matricula basis — a wholly inadequate pro-
vision for an undertaking that was sure to be vigorously opposed. On
their side the estates asked for the effective restoration of the Reichskammer-
gericht inaugurated in 1495. This was agreed. The king should nominate
the president and two assessors for Austria and Burgundy; each elector
one assessor; the estates of the six Kreise the remaining eight assessors.
Two princes, as visitors, should annually inspect the court’s work and

213

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

report to the Reichstag. The great weakness remained the lack of
sanctions. Should the court’s sentence be defied, the court and visitors
were to discuss suitable measures of enforcement and report them to the
king. That was all. So at Constance the two highly unsatisfactory im-
perial institutions, which lasted for the next three centuries, the matricula
and the Reichskammergericht, were definitely established.

Once more Maximilian’s grandiose plans for Italy came to nothing.
Early in 1508 he was at Trent. But of the promised troops there was
hardly a sign, and only a quarter of the money had come in. He had to
abandon the journey to Rome, and instead, on 6 February 1508, he
announced in the cathedral at Trent that, with Pope Julius’s consent, he
assumed the title of ‘Emperor-elect’. 1 But, if Rome was unreachable, the
insolent, bourgeois republic of Venice must be forced to surrender some
of the territory which she had filched from the Empire. So Maximilian
embarked on a struggle with Venice which continued intermittently for
eight years. For that war the Reichstag would not vote the necessary
supplies. And the German towns resented the interference with their
commercial relations with Venice. Maximilian had to operate with such
subsidies as he could raise from foreign allies and his own long-suffering
lands, and by pledging all his capital resources till he was ultimately
reduced to poverty.

In the spring of 1508 the Venetians not only defeated Maximilian’s
small forces, but overran and annexed the Habsburg territories of Gorizia,
Trieste and Istria. Maximilian had to make a truce, accepting the situation.
But chastisement awaited Venice. Louis resented the republic’s cessation
of hostilities against Maximilian, and in December 1508 the emperor’s
daughter, the wise and skilful Margaret, regent of the Netherlands,
negotiated the League of Cambrai for united Franco-Imperial action
against Venice. The League was joined by Spain and the pope. All four
powers were to fall upon Venice and no peace was to be made until each
had obtained what it claimed from her. The emperor’s share was to be
all the mainland from Verona and Padua eastwards. Again Maximilian
had to go to a Reichstag, which slowly assembled at Worms in April 1509.
Again he eloquently demanded the army which he needed. This time he
met with firm refusal. Not a man, not a gulden, for a war in which the
estates took no interest and which was to be fought in alliance with France,
so often described to them as the arch-enemy of the Reich. So the general
attack on Venice took place without the assistance of the German ally,
except that the Habsburg possessions around Trieste were recovered.
Maximilian’s one military effort, the siege of Padua (August to October
1509), with Tirolese, French, Italian and Spanish troops, ended in failure,
and he returned to Germany humiliated. Alone of the four allies he had
not achieved his purpose.

1 Maximilian will hereafter be referred to no longer as king, but as Emperor.

214

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

To the Reichstag of Augsburg, in March 1510, Maximilian submitted yet
another scheme for defence and internal order. The estates should provide
for a standing force of 50,000 men for ten years, under a commander-in-
chief and four commanders for four divisions of the Reich. A commission
of representatives of the four areas should sit, with an imperial president,
and decide when and to what extent to make use of this force in support
of the law. Some such provision of a sanction was indeed what the Reich
needed. But the estates had lost interest in central government and sus-
pected that the force, if ever embodied, would be used for the Venetian
war. They postponed the whole matter to the next Reichstag, and thus
effectively buried it.

For the next two years Maximilian was the dependent of France.
While Pope Julius was organising his Holy League with Spain, Venice
and England, to drive the French from Italy, Maximilian, like Louis,
played with the ideas of ecclesiastical reform which were so much in the
air. He tried to persuade Louis that the reforming General Council should
meet, not at Pisa, but at Trent or Verona. A national German Church,
virtually independent of the Papacy, like the French, might be achieved.
A German-bom permanent legate should exclude the jurisdiction of the
Holy See. Administrative and legal fees should no longer be paid to
Rome, but should contribute to the support of the imperial government.
When Julius fell seriously ill in August 1511, Maximilian, being again a
widower, even entertained the bizarre project of putting himself forward
for election as pope. Although she knew her father well, the Archduchess
Margaret must have gasped when she read his letter informing her of this
intention. 1 The level-headed lady replied that she would far rather see her
father married to Mary Tudor than adding the problems of the Papacy
to those which already harassed him. Also the almighty Fugger would
not finance the project. And anyhow Pope Julius suddenly recovered
his health and vigour. And Maximilian forgot his other ecclesiastical ideas
in due course. The advantages of joining the Holy League were urged
upon him by the pope and Ferdinand of Spain. For months he hovered
between France and the League. Finally in 1512 he contributed decisively
to the French expulsion from Italy by allowing the pope’s Swiss mer-
cenaries to descend on Lombardy through Tirol and by withdrawing the
Landsknechte who formed the Hite infantry in the French army. In

1 The humorous tone of Maximilian’s tetter to Margaret of 18 September 1511 has
thrown doubt on the seriousness of Maximilian’s project. But another of his letters, of
16 September, to the Landmarschall of Tirol, Paul von Lichtenstein, of which we have only
a copy, bears no traces of joking and deals with methods for raising the money necessary
for Maximilian’s election campaign for the Papacy. It is printed in Pastor’s History of the
Popes, vol. VI, appendix 90. See Schulte, Kaiser Max. I als Kandidat fur d. papstlichen Stuhl
(1906); Nagle, ‘Hat Kaiser Max. I im Jahre 1507 Papst werden wollen?’, Hist. Jakrb. d.
Corres-Cesellschaft, 1907; Ulmann (op. cit. vol. n, p. 440) thought that Maximilian was
considering, as in 1507, only the acquisition of the temporal rule of the Papal States;
contrary to the apparent meaning of the emperor’s words.

215

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

November 1512 he solemnly adhered to Julius’s Lateran Council, and was
promised papal support in his weary struggle with Venice.

But Maximilian was unable to take advantage of the vacuum of power
in northern Italy after the return of the Swiss to their homes. He was
without resources. To the Reichstag of Trier-Cologne during the summer
of 1512 he yet once more submitted plans for effective government. He
asked for the revival of the Common Penny and the formation of a
German militia as provided at Augsburg in 1500. The estates agreed in
principle, but exempted the noble classes from the tax, since they served
the Reich in other ways, and cut down the levy on the rest of the popu-
lation to the equivalent of 0 02 per cent of capital. More than that, they
said, their subjects would not stand. His other proposals were more
favourably received. The Reichstag should meet annually. In each of the
existing Kreise, used for elections to the Reichskammergericht, the estates
should be under the obligation of joining in the ‘hue and cry’ against
law-breakers, under a commander nominated by the Emperor, and should
thus provide collective security. And an executive council of the Reichstag,
consisting of eight or twelve members, resident at the imperial court,
should supervise the scheme, deal with urgent matters and foreign
relations, and act as conciliators in disputes which the parties were
unwilling to submit to the Reichskammergericht. This plan represented a
return to the deceased Reichsregiment, but under the Emperor’s control.
The estates substantially changed the proposal. To extend the system of
six Kreise to the whole Reich (excluding the Bohemian, Swiss and Italian
fringes), they now included the Habsburg and electoral areas. Saxony
and Brandenburg; the four Rhenish electorates; the Austrias; Burgundy
and the Netherlands ; were each, together with some neighbours, to form
a Kreis, making ten in all. But they insisted on the election of the com-
manders by the estates of each Kreis and rejected central control. They
agreed to the council, but as a mere board of conciliators.

Nothing came of that scheme. Except for a poorly attended and
abortive gathering at Worms in June 1513, no Reichstag met till 1517.
The Kreise only came to life years later, after Maximilian’s death. The
princes of Germany were disillusioned. The movement for effective
government was dead. The one surviving innovation, the Reichskammer-
gericht, faced with a jungle of ancient claims and customs, through which
new forces of princely administration were striving to break, was an
irritation to the greater princes, but gave little protection to the weak.
Germany was to experience shattering upheavals of social and religious
rebellion before she settled down under the rule of those princes who
succeeded in establishing areas of effective government and of those few
towns that maintained the realities of republican independence.

Even after the Reichstag of Cologne of 1512 Maximilian flung him-
self, with resilient optimism, into the schemes of the Holy League. In 1513

216

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

there were to be convergent attacks on France by Spanish, papal, Swiss,
English and imperial armies. Maximilian was to receive an English
subsidy, with which he could equip the Swiss with cavalry and guns.
His former dream, of 1496, was to come true. The western enemy was to
be destroyed. And then, in happy union and under his command, the
Christian Powers would devote themselves to the crusade against Islam.
But neither Spain nor Pope Leo X went into the war with vigour. The
Swiss did invade ducal Burgundy, but allowed themselves to be bought
off (p. 207). From the Reich Maximilian could get no support. In
August 1513 he appeared in the English camp before Therouanne. But he
came only as an expert military adviser, without an army, and found
that Henry VIII, not wishing to fight France alone, preferred to sail home
in October.

The Holy League dissolved ; and Maximilian was once more left alone,
to fight Venice with the resources of his resentful Austrian lands. But
the accession of Francis I and the French re-annexation of Milan in
September 1515 brought the League again into existence. Maximilian
made his last effort to assert himself in Italy. With English money he
hired some Swiss and German troops. He crossed the Adda and even
entered Milan on 25 March 1516, for one day. But his Swiss could not be
trusted to fight the Swiss in the French service. His funds were exhausted
and his unpaid troops mutinied and dispersed, calling Maximilian a
‘ king of straw’. The Emperor hurried home over the Alps, as in 1496 and
1509. He was now without cash and did not know where to find it. He
descended to painful expedients, deceiving the English envoys into endors-
ing drafts on banking-houses. When his grandson, the Archduke Charles
of the Netherlands, since January 1516 king of Spain, allied himself with
France at Noyon, 13 August 1516, Maximilian adhered to the alliance.
It was the end of all his efforts in Italy. Lombardy was left to France.
Out of the long war with Venice, interrupting German trade and wrecking
the Austrian finances, all that he had gained was Riva and Rovereto and
a few scattered villages and valleys.

A Reichstag met at Mainz in July 1517. A committee submitted a
painful report of violence and anarchy. The iniquities of the black sheep
among the knightly class were reaching their climax. Gangster knights
made a widely organised business of banditry and ransoms, often with
the connivance of princely officials. Franz von Sickingen, the most famous
Raubritter, organised his private army, partly financed by France, and
was able, without interference, to conduct a devastating war against the
city of Worms for three years (15 14-17), to the confusion of trade on the
Upper Rhine. In 1518 he was to attack the city of Metz and then the
territory of the Landgraf of Hesse. The Reichstag requested the Emperor
to do something about the situation ; but dissolved without adopting any
resolutions.

217

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

By the next year the Germans had been thrown into a ferment of excite-
ment by a new stimulus. The accumulated waters of their grievances
against the Catholic framework of society, as they knew it, were suddenly
released by Luther, the obscure professor in the little University of Witten-
berg. Every element of discontent, nationalist, anti-clerical, social,
economic, demanded action now that this friar, with lungs of brass and
a slashing pen, had emerged and for the moment seemed to be the revo-
lutionary leader so long desired. A Reichstag assembled in August 1518
at Augsburg to hear a papal legate and to be asked for the money for
the crusade proclaimed by the Lateran Council. In his old age (59 was
old age then) Maximilian would get his crusade, with the help of the
pope’s urgent demand. Cardinal Cajetan implored the Reichstag, in
the interests of Germany herself, to organise military support for the
Hungarians, Croats and Styrians, who were acting as the inadequate
bulwarks of Christendom. The clergy should contribute a tenth of their
income, the laity sums varying from 5 down to 2 per cent. The control
of the proceeds was the Germans’ own affair, the speaker was careful to
say; none of it should be remitted to Rome. But the papal appeal came
to Germany at the worst possible moment. The estates supplemented
their reply, that they must consult their subjects, with a long list of ‘ the
grievances of the German nation’ against the Holy See.

To Maximilian, whose strength was failing, the important matter at
Augsburg was to secure the election, as king of the Romans and future
emperor, of his grandson, Charles, ruler of the Netherlands, Spain and
Naples. This required much money. The two Hohenzollem electors,
Joachim of Brandenburg and Albert of Mainz, were already pledged, in
return for heavy cash payments and future pensions, to vote for Francis I,
should there be a vacancy in the headship of the Reich. The francophil
Lewis of the Palatinate had received Francis’s promise of the restoration
of his father’s losses in 1505. The elector of Trier was a steady adherent
of Francis, from whom he received a pension. A number of other in-
fluential German princes were also won for the French cause. To over-
trump the French offers the emperor and his councillors informed
King Charles that he must pay much more than he had expected, that only
cash payments, not promises, would suffice, and that he should authorise
them to borrow freely at their discretion. At Augsburg Maximilian
succeeded in outbidding the French and in winning over the two Hohen-
zollems and the Elector Palatine, who now received his long withheld
investiture. The elector of Cologne was promised the moderate sum which
satisfied him. The Bohemian vote, that of Maximilian himself and his
friend Sigismund of Poland, as guardians of the young King Lewis, could
now once more be used and was safe for Charles. That gave Charles
five out of the seven votes. The Emperor and the four electors entered
into a treaty to that effect on 27 August 1518. Only the elector of Trier

218

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MA.XIM1L1A.N 1

stood out for Francis; and Frederick of Saxony, protesting against the
whole business of auctioning the Reich, refused, in accordance with the
Golden Bull of 1356, to enter into any bargains. To obviate the objection
that a king of the Romans could not be elected while the existing king
had not yet been crowned emperor, Ma ximilian undertook to demand
his imperial coronation from the pope. Indeed, he made his participation
in the crusade dependent on his coronation. But Leo X was unwilling
to strengthen either of the foreign conquerors of Italy, the French king
who ruled in Milan or, still more, the Spanish king who ruled the papal
fief of Naples. He maintained the long-established papal opposition to
a union of Germany and Naples in the same hands, and indicated his
preference for the election of Frederick of Saxony, a prince respected and
not too powerful.

The death of the Emperor closed the question of his coronation and,
by creating a vacancy in the headship of the Reich, changed the situation.
The electors held themselves released from their promises to Maximilian,
and the auction between Valois and Habsburg was resumed.

After the Reichstag at Augsburg Maximilian had made his way east-
wards towards the home of his childhood at Wiener Neustadt. He was
now so penniless that his own Innsbruckers refused to house his retinue,
since old bills were unpaid. At Weis he could travel no further. There
he lay for six weeks, and died on 12 January 1519. He left the memory
of a unique personality that has fascinated posterity; but he left the
Reich in utter confusion and German opinion exasperated by the rumours
that the venal electors were about to sell the monarchy to the king of
France.

If Maximilian’s reign as German king is a tale of frustration and
increasing disorder, he has been called the founder of the Austrian State.
He aimed at unification, the creation of a disciplined administrative
service, and the separation of functions. He began, in his father’s life-
time, in 1 490 in Tirol, where a council of government for ‘Upper Austria’,
i.e. Tirol and the Habsburg possessions around the upper Rhine, already
existed. With the goodwill of the estates he substituted nomination of
the council by him self for election by them, and entrusted finance to a
separate treasury commission of four members. But in ‘Lower Austria’,
i.e Austria above and below the Enns, Styria, Carinthia, and Camiola,
his unified, authoritarian system had to be imposed on the resentful estates
of the several provinces. In 1493 he set up a council of regency for
‘Lower Austria’, and then a treasury, subordinated in 1496 to that at
Innsbruck.

In 1498, when struggling against the limitations imposed on him at
Worms, Maximilian created two organs of government for the whole
Reich including his own lands — a Hofrat, as supreme court and executive

219

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

council, and a Hofkammer supreme over all his finances. But any hope
of disciplining the Reich was shattered in Maximilian’s worst years,
1499-1502. He turned to the development of government in ‘Lower
Austria’. The regents became a permanent council at Linz, to which all,
regardless of status, could bring their grievances. At Wiener Neustadt
was established a Hofgericht as the central court, with twelve judges,
mostly jurists with the mentality of the Roman Law. The treasury
commission worked at Vienna.

These developments were opposed. The estates saw that an impersonal
organisation, composed of men indifferent to local traditions, would
gradually rob them of power and wealth. The Styrians objected that to
them Linz was foreign soil. Maximilian overrode opposition, saying
that he represented the new age and the way that the world was going.
Let them be patient with his innovations and they would come to see
their worth. His fatherly advice did not quell the opposition, and the
cost of the Venetian war eventually made concessions necessary. Maxi-
milian agreed to restore the traditional court of the Landmarschall in
each province and to the codification of provincial customs. His organs
of common government were suspended, except for the auditing treasury
and the council, which was moved to Vienna and continued to supervise
government in all five provinces. The estates began to accept the existence
of some centralised government, but to demand a share in it, an inno-
vation likely to produce a chaos of conflicting interests.

In his last year, when all his resources had been exhausted, Maximilian
summoned an assembly, representing all his Habsburg estates, to Inns-
bruck. He wanted money for the redemption of his pledged sources of
income. The estates had been fleeced for the Venetian war, which had
seemed to them an imperial affair, and they now wanted a share in Habs-
burg and in imperial government. Maximilian proposed to establish a
permanent imperial council ( Hofrat ) for the Habsburg lands and for the
Reich, the two organs of 1498 having long ceased to function. The estates
accepted the proposal in general and amended it. The Hofrat was to have
eighteen members ; four imperial officers, nine native representatives of the
Habsburg lands, and five representatives of the rest of the Reich. The latter
should be excluded when Habsburg affairs were discussed. All the finances
of ‘Austria’ should be controlled by a permanent commission of the
Habsburg estates. No war was to be made, nor Habsburg property
alienated, nor new burdens imposed, without the consent of the estates.
And all officials in ‘ Lower Austria ’ were to be under the control of the
local estates. On those conditions the assembly would grant the sums
needed for the proposed redemption.

Maximilian, though old and ill, would not accept such limitations of
his authority. He rejected the division of the Hofrat, with its suggestion
that Habsburg was a monarchy independent of the Reich, and with

220

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

untiring persistence he argued the other demands. Whether owing to his
diplomatic skill, or to divisions among the estates, or to the authoritarian
fashion of the times, in the end he was granted 400,000 gulden with which
to redeem his property, and he granted nothing, except that his Tirolese
financial authorities should be assisted by native officials from ‘Lower
Austria’.

Maximilian exhausted his resources in the Venetian war and most of
his governmental experiments were short-lived. But his council for ‘ Lower
Austria’ survived the reaction against centralisation after his death and
was maintained by Ferdinand I. His central treasury at Innsbruck con-
tinued to work, with separate departments for receipt, expenditure, and
audit. And he sought to apply principles, the collective responsibility of
permanent commissions and the separation of functions, which were
adopted by his successors and other German princes and accelerated the
creation of modern states in Germany. 1

A constant element in the background to central European life during
Maximilian’s reign was the Turkish danger. The lands of the Hungarian
Crown had long struggled, with hardly any support, to resist the Moslem
advance. A large union of forces was needed for the task. About 1500
it was not clear under what leadership such a union could be formed. It
was Maximilian’s constant endeavour, by diplomacy and occasionally by
arms, to prepare the way for a union under Habsburg rule. Habsburg had
a presentable claim to Bohemia and Hungary. If the estates of both
kingdoms, like those of Poland, jealously maintained their right to elect
their kings, their votes usually took account of heredity, succession
treaties and the need of support. In 1438 the Emperor Albert II for the
moment had united Austria, Bohemia and Hungary under Habsburg
rule, with the hope of support from the Reich and the advantage that the
Czech and Magyar kingdoms had German populations in their towns
and mining villages. That union had dissolved. But by treaty in 1463
Frederick III was to be titular king of Hungary and, should the Hungarian
Matthias Corvinus, the ruling king, die without male heirs, the succession
was to go to Habsburg. And Frederick was careful to adopt Matthias,
thus implying that the treaty was a fatherly concession.

When Matthias conquered Moravia and Silesia and then Austria, it
seemed probable that the large union would be led by Hungary. His
territories extended from Brandenburg to Serbia. But he died without a
male heir in 1490, and his empire fell apart into its traditional units.
Austria returned to Habsburg. But the Magyar nobles, who distrusted a
German almost as much as a Turkish ruler, elected the king of Poland’s

1 For the controversy whether and to what extent Maximilian introduced Burgundian
methods of government into Germany, see F. Hartung, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte,
§ 21 .

221

NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

eldest son, Wladislaw Jagiello, king of Bohemia since 1471. The possibility
opened that Bohemia and Hungary might become members of a great
union under Polish leadership. No such union was created. The Polish
nobles successively elected three brothers of Wladislaw. Moreover, these
eastern monarchs, less even than Maximilian, had not the resources of
revenue, troops, administration and diplomacy necessary for the efficient
control of their kingdoms.

Maximilian’s expedition into Hungary in 1491 resulted in Wladislaw’s
agreement that, should his line fail of direct male heirs, the succession
should pass to Habsburg; an agreement accepted by a Hungarian diet
at Buda in March 1492.

Thereafter Maximilian and Wladislaw remained allies. But a number of
the Magyar nobles caused their diet to declare, in October 1505, that if
the king died without a male heir, they would have no foreigner as his
successor. Maximilian and Wladislaw replied with an agreement, of
March 1 506, that Wladislaw’s daughter Anne should marry a grandson of
Maximilian, and that his expected child, if a boy, should marry a grand-
daughter of Maximilian. To impose this settlement on the recalcitrant
Magyar nobles Maximilian again invaded Hungary (p. 213). The birth of
Wladislaw’s son, Lewis, during the campaign of 1 506, facilitated a treaty
(12 November 1507) confirming the previous succession agreements and
providing that Anne should marry that grandson of Maximilian who
should become ruler of the Austrian lands.

The more stubborn of the Magyar nobles rejected the treaty and found
a leader in John Zapolyai, whose sister Barbara in 1512 married the
Polish king Sigismund. To counteract a possible Polish-Hungarian alliance
Maximilian stimulated Ivan of Muscovy to threaten Poland and the
Teutonic Order to reassert itself. But Wladislaw warned him that he
must choose between friendship with Poland and the denunciation of the
succession agreements. Maximilian dropped his anti-Polish allies, and
the two Jagiello kings, of Poland and Bohemia-Hungary, met the emperor
at Vienna in 1515. There the succession agreements were confirmed.
Young Lewis was betrothed to Maximilian’s granddaughter Mary. In the
absence of his grandsons the 56-year-old Maximilian was himself con-
ditionally betrothed to the 12-year-old Anne. In the next year he was
relieved of a third matrimonial venture and the Archduke Ferdinand was
duly married to Anne by procuration. Lastly Maximilian adopted Lewis
as his son.

All this artificial construction of succession treaties, marriages and
adoptions did not secure the Habsburg succession in Bohemia and Hun-
gary. It was the shattering victory of the Turks at Mohacs in 1526, and
Lewis’s death there, that drove the diets of the Bohemian lands and a
part of the Hungarian diet to face realities and adhere to the great Habs-
burg empire which had come into existence. They conferred the two crowns

222

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE EMPIRE UNDER MAXIMILIAN I

upon Ferdinand, ruler of the Austrian lands and brother of the Emperor,
who was king of Spain and the victor of Pavia.

Maximilian did not live to see the union which provided the power to
protect the Reich and ultimately to repel the Moslem invaders from central
Europe. But his persistent efforts to make possible a Danubian union
under Habsburg rule justify the view of him as the father of the Habsburg
monarchy of Austria-Bohemia-Hungary.

223

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER VIII

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS,
1477-1521

T he unconfirmed news of the death of Duke Charles of Burgundy
at the battle of Nancy (5 January 1477) created confusion in the
Netherlands, restive at the cost of his wars. On 11 January 1477
Charles’s widow Margaret of York and Mary, his only child, summoned
the Estates General to Ghent. A fresh army had to be raised for defence
against France; and if the duke was dead, as was the case despite contrary
rumours, Mary had to be admitted as his heir by the provincial estates
in each of the territories that composed the Burgundian Netherlands.

The forthcoming assembly of the Estates General was contemplated
with misgivings at court, for in 1476 they had bitterly attacked ducal
policy, and in summoning the present meeting relief from outstanding
taxation was at once promised. Nevertheless, the general, unlike the
territorial, estates were founded not on local custom but on the the
institution of Duke Philip le Bon; and they had, up to the death of Duke
Charles, served the duke’s prerogative more than his subjects’ liberties.

On 3 February Mary addressed at Ghent the estates, which, by recog-
nising her as heir in all her father’s lands, preserved the cohesion of the
Netherlands ; but they asked that she should grant ‘ certain general articles ’.
The Grand Privilege is the monument to the estates of 1477. To prevent
the prince from pursuing a policy, domestic or foreign, other than one
which satisfied each of his territories, it transferred to the estates, both
general and local, the right to assemble themselves without summons.
The declaration of war, an urgent matter in 1477, was made conditional
on their approval. The Grand Privilege distinguished between the sovereign’s
interests and those of his subjects, who were to be allowed to trade with
his enemies as Flanders had demanded since at least the fourteenth
century.

Its purpose was to protect the regional liberties of each territory
rather than to set up a general constitution. The supremacy of local
jurisdiction was enthroned ; and in accordance with the principle de non
evocando no one was to be cited save before his local court. However,
the Grand Privilege could not protect particularism without reforming the
central power, which the estates wanted to modify rather than destroy.
The economic advantages of unity were naturally appreciated; but the
Grand Privilege, although it abolished the Parlement of Malines, did not
deprive the Burgundian lands of a high court, for it invented a Grand
Conseil.

224

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I521

The Parlement of Charles the Bold was staffed wholly by jurists, mostly
from the duchy or county of Burgundy; the Grand Conseil was to be
composed of lawyers and noblemen from all the duchess’s lands, which
were proportionally represented. The larger units, Brabant, Burgundy,
Flanders, Holland and Zeeland were to provide two lawyers and two
noblemen each, and the smaller territories either two or one represen-
tative. The proceedings were to be conducted in the language of the country
from which a particular suit emanated. Moreover, the fact that the
seigneurs du sang (lords related to the duchess) were to be admitted to
the Grand Conseil, which was also to accompany the duchess, suggests
that it was designed as a political council as well as a law-court.

Despite the article which permitted the estates in the last resort to
distrain upon the duchess by withdrawal of obedience, the Grand Privilege
was as much a federal as a feudal charter; and its Grand Conseil was to
include members from Holland, Zeeland, Luxemburg and Burgundy
none of which were represented when Mary granted the Grand Privilege
on 11 February 1477. Although it restated traditional ideas of reform
by forbidding the farming of judicial offices, and the appointment to
ecclesiastical dignities in commendam, the motive was always to restrain
the prince.

Even if Louis XI of France had not then been launching an invasion
to recover the spoils of Duke Charles’s overthrow, the Grand Privilege
would still have been unpractical. It tried to place the ruler of the
Burgundian lands in tutelage as the estates of Brabant had done to their
duke in 1422; and the experiment, which failed in Brabant, had small
chance of success when applied to what was already a European Power.
Hainault obtained for conservation at Mons a French translation of the
Flemish original of the Grand Privilege. The other Burgundian Netherlands
obtained their own concessions, either when Mary was admitted as their
particular countess or duchess (for example Flanders, 11 February 1477,
the same day as the Grand Privilege, Brabant, Blijde Inkomst, 29 May 1477)
or by procuration (for example Holland, 14 March 1477, whose charter
is also called Groot Privilegie). In its collective sense the Grand Privilege
was revolutionary. These charters accorded with that constitutional
procedure whereby a new ruler entered contractual relations with each
territory.

The reaction against Duke Charles ensured that the local charters
reduced central and local regalian power to its minimum. Territorial
self-sufficiency was everywhere proclaimed, in jurisdiction and appoint-
ment to offices. The charters cannot be dismissed as purely reactionary,
for they were close to realities ; and the Groot Privilegie of Holland was
enlightened in its provisions regulating recovery of the drowned and digging
for peat within dykes. Mary’s charters, unlike the Grand Privilege,
furnished the substance over which her son in 1495 and her grandson

225

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

in 1515 had to negotiate. In essentials, Mary’s charters resemble each
other. 1

From the 1470’s to the 1490’s some of the best names and wisest heads
were attracted from the Burgundian camp to the side of France. In 1477
Louis XI had an opportunity to acquire the Low Countries, where nobles
and officials disliked the gallophobia of the late duke and the estates saw
in a French marriage for Mary the restoration of peace. Had he adhered
to bribery and diplomacy Louis XI could scarcely have failed, but he
would attempt two policies. One was the marriage of the duchess to the
dauphin, the other was the armed conquest of Mary’s inheritance. The
result was that he achieved a minor success, while the main prize, the hand
of Mary, fell to the house of Habsburg.

The conquest of the territories formerly ruled by Charles the Bold
appeared deceptively easy. Despite sporadic resistance, Louis XI overran
to the south the duchy and county of Burgundy, the latter an imperial fief,
and to the north the Somme region, most of Artois and all the Boulonnais.

The personal efforts of Mary to broach negotiations with France in
January 1477 having failed, the estates could not be kept out of dip-
lomacy. Early in February an embassy to France was commissioned,
led by the late duke’s chancellor, Guillaume Hugonet, but including also
representatives of the estates. The chancellor and the lord of Humber-
court, another servant of Duke Charles, were given a letter to the king
written jointly by the duchess, by Margaret of York and by the lieutenant-
general of the Low Countries, Adolf of Cleves-Ravenstein. No copy of it
exists; but according to Commynes it asked Louis to deal with Hugonet
and Humbercourt. The distinction between ambassadors and other
members of a mission was well established ; and the letter was probably
a credence for the two ambassadors, rather than a contrivance to exclude
the envoys of the estates. It proved, none the less, a maladroit combination
of private and public diplomacy.

This embassy made no impression on Louis, who pushed forward his
invasion; and about the middle of February 1477 the estates decided to
raise a common army from the entire Netherlands, while sending to
Louis a new mission made up of nobles, ecclesiastics and burghers, but
no court officials.

Again Louis XI refused peace on terms other than the hand of the
duchess for the dauphin. He was, however, polite to the burghers, to whom
he handed the former credence on behalf of Hugonet and Humbercourt, for
he meant to exploit the suspicion that the estates felt towards the officers
of the late duke. In this he was successful. As soon as the embassy
returned to Ghent, proposals for raising a common army were dropped
and Hugonet and Humbercourt were arrested. Mary made a brave effort
to save them; but they were both executed on 3 April 1477. The record

1 P. van Ussel, De regeering van Maria van Bourgondie (Louvain, 1943), pp. 49-65.

226

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, 1477-1521

of their trial is lost, vague accusations of treason remain ; but they would
not have suffered had they not been the agents of a fallen regime. Shortly
after their execution Ghent procured letters of pardon excusing its
participation in the affair. Mons, following the example of Ghent, arrested
the receiver of the ducal estates, who was executed, despite the intervention
of the duchess, on the sentence of a local court. A wave of unrest such as
periodically swept the Netherlands broke over the towns in the next few
months. At Brussels, the artisans were particularly violent ; but the general
picture was everywhere the same. The lesser trades led the attack on the
magistrates and the rich who were identified with the government.

Among the deserters to France the most conspicuous were Anthony,
eldest surviving bastard of Philip le Bon, styled Le Grand Batard, and
Philippe de Crevecoeur, lord of Esquerdes, who became the king’s lieu-
tenant in Picardy, and henceforth identified his career with the extension
of the French frontier in the north. However, local resistance in Hainault
and elsewhere was growing, and the manner in which Louis XI waged war
turned opinion away from any French marriage for Mary.

There had been innumerable suitors for the hand of Mary, but once the
Valois alliance became impracticable the Habsburg alternative predomi-
nated. For what it was worth Mary was already affianced to Maximilian
of Habsburg, the son of the Emperor Frederick III ; and although Mary
was under supervision from the commune of Ghent, the dowager Margaret
of York became the champion of the Habsburg cause. Before March 1477
Burgundian agents were in Austria and brought Habsburg ambassadors
to espouse Mary at Bruges on 21 April 1477 in the name of Maximilian.

Fear of French aggression was such that the estates welcomed a Habs-
burg alliance. Their meeting at Ghent had petered out, but Brabant,
implementing the right conceded under the Grand Privilege for the estates
to convene themselves, called the representatives of Flanders, Hainault,
Holland-Zeeland and Namur to gather at Louvain in May 1477. The
chancellor of Brabant, Jean de la Bouverie, told them that Mary had
undertaken not to marry without the consent of the estates, who now
approved her union with Maximilian, provided that he ratified the liberties
which she had granted. An ambassador of the emperor expounded the
marriage treaty, which was translated into French and Dutch for the
benefit of the estates, who on this occasion fulfilled the role which the
Grand Privilege had foreseen for them.

Margaret of York urged the emperor’s ambassadors to make haste, for,
while Maximilian duke of Austria was journeying westward slowly for
lack of money, Ghent was preparing to produce a substitute for him ip
the person of Adolf of Egmond, the hereditary heir of Guelders, who had
been imprisoned from before his father Duke Arnold’s sale of Guelders
to Charles the Bold in 1472. Through the agency of Ghent, Adolf was
released and made an honorary citizen of the town, which planned to

227

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

force him as a husband on Mary. The trades of Ghent provided a force
which under Adolf’s command attacked the French positions around
Toumai, but disbanded, leaving him to be killed covering the rear
(27 June 1477). Mary heard of Adolf’s death without regret; but the
episcopal city of Toumai remained a French thorn in the side of the
Netherlands until the English conquest in 1513 and its final incorpora-
tion by Charles V in 1521. The urban militia of Bruges was routed by
the French shortly after; and in judging the early popularity of Maxi-
milian one must remember that he came to the Low Countries when their
own efforts at self-defence had proved unavailing.

The marriage of the duke of Austria, aged eighteen, to Mary, aged
twenty, was celebrated at the Prinsenhof within Ghent on 19 August 1477.
There is little reason to regard it as necessarily sealing the fate of the
independent Netherlands. They had already naturalised the Valois dukes,
who had as large a stake in France as the Habsburgs in Germany, and
were intellectually and physically more than equal to the Habsburgs.
The nuptial contract was drawn in general terms, both parties adhering to
written as against customary law. In the event of the death of one parent,
the children alone were to inherit to the exclusion of the surviving parent’s
rights. But the marriage settlement was upset by letters patent of Mary
(17 September 1477) settling on the duke of Austria her inheritance if
she was to die without children. The estates after the death of Mary
refused to countenance any amendment of the marriage contract; but
momentarily constitutional vigilance was in abeyance. Maximilian had,
of course, to confirm territorial charters, but he was never made to seal
the Grand Privilege.

Maximilian was greeted as a defender against France; but though
always a brave knight he never became a general. Moreover, the resources
of Louis XI were superior to anything he could muster from the Nether-
lands. He was hampered by an unwarlike population, which compelled
him to hire mercenaries, mainly Germans, at terrific cost. The wages of
these mercenaries were seldom paid, and their rapine became the standing
grudge of the peace-loving Netherlands against him. Maximilian’s in-
ability to negotiate or impose a peace by arms upon France hindered the
reconstruction of princely authority in the Low Countries, where hardship
always excited unrest. Louis XI played on this unrest by economic
warfare. His troops destroyed crops in the upper Scheldt area to deplete
the grain staple of Ghent, his fleets attacked the Flemish herring fisheries
and intercepted vessels carrying grain from the Baltic to Holland. His
influence with the banking houses of Florence prevailed on them to deny
loans to the Burgundian court.

Hostilities followed the medieval pattern of raids and surprises, inter-
rupted by two major truces from July 1478 to July 1479 and from
August 1480 to March 1481. The single pitched battle, at Guinegatte

228

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I52I

(7 August 1479), was a Burgundian victory, which if properly followed
up might have led to the recapture of Arras. If the fighting delayed the
recovery of the Netherlands from the crisis of 1477, it nevertheless proved
that, although Artois and Picardy could not be reconquered, a line from
Gravelines, on the Channel, to Luxemburg could be successfully defended
against the French.

The former network of Burgundian diplomacy was renewed. The vital
alliances were those with England (1478, 1480) and with Brittany (1480);
the latter restored the duke of Austria to something of the position which
Charles the Bold had held as leader of the feudatories of France.

In the northern and eastern lands, either recently conquered by Charles,
like the duchy of Guelders and the bishopric of Liege, or indirectly
controlled like the bishopric of Utrecht, whose bishop David was a
bastard son of Philip le Bon, the crisis of 1477 released pent-up feuds of
which Louis XI took full advantage. Maximilian was too taken up with
fighting on the French frontier to pay much attention to Holland, Utrecht
and Guelders until 1481; but his absence may have been advantageous
to the preservation of Burgundian power, for its defence was left to its
local partisans, and, however much withstood by particularist elements
among the townsmen and gentry, the Burgundian State had influential
champions, who had thrown in their lot with its survival. Thus in Holland,
tom by a recrudescence of the old Hoek and Kabeljauw feuds, the Kabel-
jauws were undisguisedly a government party. At Utrecht Bishop David
was compelled in 1477 to grant concessions rather like the Grand Privilege
on a local scale, but by May 1481 he had temporarily regained authority.
In 1477 Guelders evinced a desire to return to its native dynasty; but on
the death of its duke, Adolf, outside Tournai, his son Charles remained
to be brought up at the court of Mary; and Jan van Egmond, a member
of the house of IJsselstein, a cadet branch of the ducal family of Guelders,
fought with varying success on behalf of the Burgundian cause in Holland,
Utrecht and Guelders.

The two ecclesiastical territories of Utrecht and Liege were the gravest
problems, especially the latter because of its proximity to France. In
March 1477 Mary had to renounce the rights which her father gained
over Liege by his conquest of 1468. The city of Liege had not recovered
sufficiently from its sack at the hands of Charles the Bold; and its bishop
Louis de Bourbon, an uncle and a councillor of Mary, hoped to regain
authority by securing recognition of the neutrality of Liege from Burgun-
dian and French belligerents. He was not strong enough to enforce this
solution because he was challenged in his temporal power by the feudal
house of La Marck, lords of much of the Ardennes, whom Louis XI
used as the agents of French intervention throughout the Meuse valley.
The consequent weakness of the bishop at least enabled Maximilian to
regain some of the traditional Burgundian influence over Liege.

229

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The birth of children to Mary, of whom two survived, Philip, born in
1478, and Margaret, bom in 1480, reawakened loyalty to the dynasty,
which contributed to the success of Mary and Maximilian in reviving the
institutions of the Valois dukes under difficult circumstances. The Order
of the Golden Fleece, which was symbolical of the European status of
the ducal house, was restored by Maximilian in April 1478. In this
Louis XI, who talked of assuming the sovereignty of the Order since
his conquest of the duchy of Burgundy in 1477, was forestalled.

The administration was also rebuilt. Although the execution of Hugonet
interrupted the series of the chanceliers de Bourgogne, the supreme officers
of the dukes, that series was reopened by the appointment in March 1480
of Jean Carandolet. Significantly, he was a native of Franche-Comte, the
county of Burgundy which, unlike the duchy of Burgundy, Louis XI
never quite conquered. Franche-Comte continued, much to the discontent
of the Low Countries, to supply the Habsburgs with law officers.

The Grand Conseil, set up under the Grand Privilege, came in practice
to play the role of the former Parlement of Malines from which it took
over many distinguished lawyers, Philip Wielant among them. Although
it did not strictly follow the movements of the duchess and tended to
become sedentary, it transferred with her from one territory to another
in order to keep in reasonable proximity to her. It was certainly not
inactive, and in 1479 alone gave 107 judgments, By hearing suits removed
from local courts it undoubtedly broke the Grand Privilege-, and in 1482
the enemies of centralisation wanted to clear the Grand Conseil of jurists.

The cost of the war and a prodigality that Maximilian early showed
and never outlived caused him to pawn many of Mary’s heirlooms ; but
the fiscal mechanism of the State remained. The central finance court that
Charles the Bold erected at Malines never reappeared, so that the Chambre
des Comptes at Lille and the Rekenkamers at Brussels and The Hague
recovered their independence. But if the finances were geographically
decentralised, administrative unity returned, for Charles with his ad-
miration of French models had introduced the French division between
the ordinary and extraordinary revenue. The destruction of his financial
reforms brought back the sound Burgundian methods of Philip le Bon
under which income from the domain and from taxation was administered
by the same officials called commis sur le fait des domaines et finances.

Had the duke of Austria been more tactful and introduced fewer
Germans to his court, the reconstruction of a central administrative
edifice would still have conflicted with the spirit of the Grand Privilege
and the letter of the provincial charters. In Brabant Maximilian ran into
difficulties on reviving the procureur general, a guardian of the prerogative
abolished by the Blijde Inkomst of 1 477, and in Holland there was opposition
to his appointment of officers who were not natives of the county.

He was criticised, more especially at Ghent, for conducting foreign

230

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I521

affairs like an absolute sovereign by concluding a truce with France (1478)
and an alliance with England (1480), without a word to the estates. In
February 1481 increased taxation was met by demands for reduction of
household expenditure and for the exclusion from the duchy and county
of Burgundians, who were considered willing agents of absolutism.

Opposition was stiffening in the manner of 1477; but jointly Mary
and Maximilian could probably have overcome it. But Mary died on
27 March 1482 as the result of a riding accident outside Bruges.

The death of Charles the Bold produced a reaction against centralisation,
and the death of Mary not only renewed that reaction but also introduced
a long constitutional crisis affecting the head of the State.

Unhesitatingly the estates recognised Mary’s baby son Philip as prince
nature l ; but they denied the claim of Maximilian to become automatically
regent ( mambour ) during Philip’s minority. On their side they had the
precedent of Brabant appointing a regency for the son of Duke Anthony
who fell at Agincourt. In forcing upon Maximilian a treaty with Louis XI
that made the king of France the guarantor of their supremacy, the estates
weremore revolutionary. Theinitiativecamefromthe Members of Flanders
(Ghent, Bruges and Ypres), led by Ghent, whose pensioner Willem Rym
told the other provinces in April 1482 that together they should exercise
Vestat et government des pays. Flanders won over the support of Brabant,
where similar views were entertained in Brussels, Louvain and originally
also at Antwerp. In October 1482 an association was formed between
Flanders and Brabant ostensibly for defence, but really to exclude the
duke of Austria and replace his power by a federation. Philip was to
reside by turns in each of his lands ; but for the time he and his sister
Margaret were held by Ghent, which understood the value of their
possession. Holland and Hainault refused to enter this association; but
so long as they worked together Brabant and Flanders were strong,
certainly stronger than the duke of Austria.

The Peace of Arras was concluded on 23 December 1482; but, months
before, its terms were substantially settled with Louis XI by envoys of
the estates regardless of Maximilian. Margaret of Austria, the daughter
of Mary, was to marry the dauphin ; and she together with her dowry,
consisting of Artois and the county of Burgundy, were to be handed over
at once to the French. The fact that legally the county of Flanders was
part of the kingdom of France was uncompromisingly reasserted. On
attaining his majority Philip was to do homage to the king for Flanders.
In the meanwhile the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris in Flanders
was restored. Louis XI exercised his rights as a suzerain by confirming
all charters granted to Flanders since the death of Charles the Bold. The
position of the estates in the other territories was safeguarded by an
article which declared that if through the death of Philip their inheritance

231

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

should fall to Margaret and the dauphin ‘ le gouvernement desdits pays
demeure en l’estat qu’il sera trouve’.

Louis XI dispelled fears of confiscation, which were a bugbear of the
well-to-do since the dispossessions of Charles VII's reign. In Artois and
Burgundy, fiefs and clerical benefices were not to be disturbed, and
patents of nobility conferred since 1477 were recognised. The interest from
‘rentes’ sold by Duke Charles on the security of the ducal domain within
the ceded counties was guaranteed. The fairs of Antwerp, which he had
tried to ruin for the benefit of Caen, were now privileged by Louis, who
gave assurances for the safety of the herring fleets.

The peace of 1482 reversed the 1435 Treaty of Arras. Louis XI retrieved
the mistakes he made after the death of Charles the Bold, and shattered
the Burgundian alliances which Maximilian had rebuilt, for England and
Brittany were excluded from the peace. The treaty, which was printed in
France and the Netherlands, attempted to place their relations on a more
stable basis. Its value is best understood by associating it with the treaties
of Senlis (1493) and Paris (1515).

The duke of Austria could only look on while his daughter Margaret
was given up to the French and his son Philip was admitted count of
Flanders in January 1483 to become the figure-head of an alternative
government set up by the estates. Authority was exercised in Philip’s
name by a council composed of Adolf of Cleves-Ravenstein, Philip lord
of Beveren, son of Anthony le Grand Batard, Louis of Gruuthuse and
Adrian Vilain, lord of Rassenghem. It is significant that the first two
were seigneurs du sang, related to the Burgundian dynasty, and the last
two members of the urbanised aristocracy representing Bruges and Ghent
respectively. For the next few years a broad section of the nobility, not
only those living in the towns, opposed Maximilian and worked with the
estates in the name of Philip for an understanding with France. The
driving force behind Philip’s government was Ghent; and what in 1483
and 1488 might seem to be ‘Flemish separatism’ is better understood
if seen as the last attempt of Ghent to substitute its own power for that
of the prince over an area wider than Flanders.

Since the Peace of Arras, Maximilian at least had a freer hand over the
bishoprics of Liege and Utrecht, where Louis XI had abandoned his
minor allies, the La Marck family in the former and the Hoek party in
the latter.

Guillaume de la Marck, having made himself mambour (roughly the
bishop’s military and secular lieutenant), had led a revolt and killed the
bishop Louis de Bourbon in battle (30 August 1482). Guillaume only
just failed to coerce the chapter of St Lambert into adopting his son as
bishop of Liege. However, Brabant provided Maximilian with an army
of intervention, for the duchy traditionally regarded the Pays de Liege as
its own sphere of interest. On 8 January 1483 the La Marcks were

232

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I52I

defeated by Maximilian's captain Philip of Cleves-Ravenstein (the son
of Adolf); and John of Hoome, whose family was associated with the
Burgundian court, retained the bishopric of Liege. Although the power
of the La Marck family was not destroyed, it was checked, and Habsburg
influence at Liege rescued.

The duke of Austria himself took part in the hard fighting which finally
in August 1483 restored Bishop David of Burgundy to his see at Utrecht.
Maximilian was recognised as the lay ‘advocate’ of the bishopric, the
status which his Burgundian predecessors held and which enabled them
to exercise indirect control over the extensive lands of Utrecht.

Before this he had struck a blow against the party of the estates in
Brabant, where on his orders representatives of Antwerp, Brussels and
Louvain were arrested in May 1483. Four of them were executed on
charges of treason, including the plenipotentiaries of Antwerp and Brussels
at the Peace of Arras. The duke of Austria’s high-handed action did not
evoke a reaction in Brabant, which was growing suspicious of Flanders
and tired of the retention of Philip at Ghent. Indeed, the unswerving
loyalty of Antwerp towards the central authority dates from this event.

The duke of Austria had strengthened his position when Louis XI
died (30 August 1483), leaving the throne of France to Charles VIII,
aged thirteen, to whom Margaret of Austria was betrothed. So long
as Louis lived, it was certain that the party which used Philip against
his father Maximilian would be secure in the might of France. Not that
intervention was henceforth abandoned; but Anne of Beaujeu, the regent
for Charles VIII, had difficulties at home and could not send aid abroad
in every direction. French military and diplomatic intervention in the
Low Countries came to be increasingly delegated to d’Esquerdes, the
former Burgundian, who was created marshal of France (21 January 1485).

The time seemed ripe to the duke of Austria to overthrow the alternative
government around his son; and at the Antwerp fair in September 1483
with maximum publicity he proclaimed the dismissal of Philip’s councillors.
There followed a polemical exchange between them and him, each side
raking up financial scandals against the other. Maximilian had overrated
his power, and in May 1484 the Golden Fleece made the first of several
attempts to mediate between him and the dissident Netherlands. The
order was, characteristically, represented in both camps, and avoided a
schism by recognising Maximilian as regent, but without concealing that
it did so to preserve the inheritance of Philip. Mediation with Flanders
broke down because of the intransigeance of Ghent, where Jan Coppen-
hole, until his death in 1492, was to use the struggle against Maximilian
to make himself a civic tyrant.

Flanders did not shrink from civil war, and readily applied economic
sanctions against the remainder of the Netherlands, Ghent prohibiting
the export of grain, and Bruges building a blockhouse on the Scheldt to

233

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

strangle the trade of Antwerp. The self-aggrandisement of Flanders drove
opinion elsewhere toward the duke of Austria, who was supported by
Holland. He was poor, and only limited objectives could be attempted
by his mercenaries, so that raids were undertaken across the Scheldt, and
the ransoms of prisoners and the captured cattle were sold by official
auctioneers in Antwerp. Charles VIII had made a military alliance with
Flanders (25 October 1484) and sent a virtual ultimatum to the duke of
Austria (27 December 1484) summoning him to evacuate Flanders; but
the French alliance could not save Flanders from being hemmed in, and
on 28 June 1485 the partisans of court and commerce admitted the duke
of Austria to Bruges.

The reaction had also set in at Ghent where the cry ‘ Vrient Oostenrijk'
was heard in the streets, and Jan Coppenhole fled to France. A moderate
treaty with the Members of Flanders restored Philip to Maximilian and
opened Ghent to him, but a few days of misbehaviour by his German
mercenaries sufficed to produce an uproar in Ghent, where the trades in
arms and under their banners occupied the old market. Maximilian was
contemplating whether to destroy Ghent as his father-in-law had destroyed
Liege; but Margaret of York and Philip of Cleves dissuaded him. Ghent
was compelled to make a submission harsher than the foregoing treaty
with Flanders. On 22 July 1485 the duke’s audiencier publicly lacerated
the charters which the town had received since 1477. The situation after
the battle of Gavere in 1453 was substantially restored, for the trades were
excluded and the duke reserved to himself the Renewal of the Law (the
periodical reappointment of the magistrates), while the civic militia, the
Witte Caproens, was abolished. The young Philip was removed to the
shelter of Malines, the dower town of Margaret of York, who supervised
his education.

The duke of Austria was victorious, but not strong, for despite the
indemnity from Flanders and Ghent he was financially crippled. A few
magnates, who in return for their services received offices, lands and
pecuniary rewards, derived a greater relative advantage; and the years
1485-8 mark a stage in the transformation of the courtiers of Charles the
Bold into the oligarchs of the time of Philip le Beau and after. The mag-
nates had none the less a better knowledge than the duke of Austria of
what the country wanted; and during his absence in Germany from
November 1485 to May i486 (for his election as king of the Romans on
16 February i486), the council which he left behind composed of Philip
of Cleves, Engelbert of Nassau and, with special reference to legal
matters, the chancellor Jean Carandolet, won popularity mainly by pre-
serving peace with France.

Maximilian returned with his father Frederick III, who came to live
off the Netherlands while the Hungarians occupied Vienna. The king
of the Romans, instead of devoting himself to the recuperation of the

234

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I52I

Low Countries and above all to the restoration of their finances, im-
mediately reopened hostilities with France. He attempted, until he had to
leave the Netherlands ignominiously in 1489, to succeed where Charles
the Bold had failed. Like Charles he sought to lead a coalition of French
feudatories against the Crown and to conduct a grand invasion of France.
Had Maximilian been more successful with his invasions in i486 and 1487,
he might have recovered the entire inheritance of Charles by gaining the
full co-operation of the feudatories, who were only too anxious to utilise
the weakness of the crown during the minority of Charles VIII. But it was
in these years that Maximilian betrayed his inability to wage war, and
that d’Esquerdes rendered invaluable service to France by the successful
defence of her northern frontier. His failure wholly discredited the king
of the Romans in the eyes of the Low Countries, where special taxation,
such as Ruitergeld in Holland, was levied to pay for his mercenary armies,
who fell instead to plundering the provinces. The nobility was left to
conduct the war like a tournament ; and a syndicate of nobles, who planned
to surprise Bethune in August 1487, fell into an ambush in which Charles
of Egmond, heir of Guelders, and Engelbert of Nassau were captured by
the French.

By the autumn of 1487 warfare had reduced the central authority to the
chaotic condition which followed the death of Mary in 1482. Rassenghem
was rescued by sympathisers from the state prison of Vilvorde, in which
he had been confined since 1485, and Jan Coppenhole returned from
France to Ghent, where the magistrature was renewed in November 1487
in a sense wholly inimical to Maximilian, whose partisans had to flee to
Bruges. Acting on behalf of Flanders, Ghent now reverted to the right
conceded by the Grand Privilege, under which the estates could assemble
themselves, and invited Brabant and Hainault to joint consultations. To
forestall a rival gathering under the aegis of Ghent, Maximilian was driven
to summon the estates to Bruges.

Philip of Cleves advised that the estates should be held in the fortress
of Sluis, but the king of the Romans, ignoring the lesson of the rising in
Ghent (1485) and an ugly scene at Brussels (i486) on the arrival of his
father the emperor, took up residence in Bruges without armed protection.
When at the last moment he prepared to introduce German mercenaries,
the inhabitants, in terror at the prospect of a garrison of Landsknechte,
shut the gates of Bruges (1 February 1488) trapping inside Maximilian
and his court. Their action was unpremeditated, but had graver conse-
quences than wrecking Maximilian’s plan for holding the estates. The
trades of Bruges, dominated by the lesser guilds, encamped on the market
under arms. They scarcely knew what to do with the king of the Romans,
but vented their grievances on his local partisans and officers. Among
the latter, the treasurer, Pierre Lanchals, was executed. The politicians of
Ghent seized the opportunity offered to them by the artisans of Bruges,

235

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

and took control, removing the surviving courtiers of Maximilian, in-
cluding the chancellor Jean Carandolet, to serve as hostages for Ghent
in subsequent negotiations.

Bruges was frightened at its temerity, which startled German patriotism
into life. The elector of Cologne pronounced spiritual censures, which
threatened to bring grave economic consequences on Flanders, while
by April 1488 Frederick III was leading an imperial army to his son’s
rescue. Within the Netherlands the method rather than the principle of
restraining Maximilian was disapproved. The general assumption that
the king of the Romans would only be released in exchange for a consti-
tution on the lines of the Grand Privilege accounts for the ease with which
Ghent transformed the estates summoned to negotiate Maximilian’s
freedom into a meeting which was to draft a statute to eliminate his
power. In accordance with this development, the estates, which gathered
at the end of February 1488 at Malines, the residence of Philip, now styled
archduke, ended up in Ghent, where on 12 May they adopted ‘The
Union, Alliance and Confederation’. This instrument had been submitted
at the Hotel Ravenstein in Brussels to an aristocratic committee composed
of Adolf of Cleves-Ravenstein, Philip his son, Philip of Beveren, Antoine
Rolain, grand bailli of Hainault, and Jean de la Bouverie, recently
chancellor of Brabant.

‘The Union’ abolished the regency of Maximilian in Flanders, and
only allowed it to continue in the other territories under the seigneurs du
sang. During Philip’s minority the estates were to assemble annually,
the first year at Brussels, the second at Ghent and the third at Mons; for
the annual assembly was not to be twice in the same territory until it
had been held at least once in the other two. The scope of the estates was
defined as the correction of toutes nouvellites prejudicial to the individual
territories ; and because it was apparently more concerned with provincial
than general liberties ‘ The Union ’ has been compared unfavourably with
the Grand Privilege. However, it was meant to provide the permanent
basis for a constitution, for the preamble to ‘ The Union ’ declared that in
so far as it touched the lordship of the prince naturel, it was only to last
for Philip’s minority, but en tant qu'il touche le police dureront a per-
petuite. Not only was the joint power {la main commune) of the provinces
to be applied in negotiations with the German princes; but in a federal
spirit an invitation to join ‘The Union’ was addressed to the bishoprics
of Liege and Utrecht, and to unspecified ‘ pays voisins’.

The king of the Romans was set free on 16 May 1488 after swearing
to renounce reprisals on Flanders in a treaty, which embodied ‘ The Union ’
and became known as the Peace of Bruges. Although Philip of Cleves
was left behind as a hostage in Bruges, and had to swear to fight
against Maximilian for ‘The Union’ in the event of his breaking his
oath, the king joined his father Frederick III and the imperial army

236

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I521

at Louvain and repudiated the peace. He claimed that he was bound by
an earlier oath to serve the emperor ; but Maximilian’s action was purely
political and cannot be excused on moral grounds. Philip of Cleves, who
took up arms against him, was better versed in politics than to have
supposed that Maximilian would abide by his oath and too shrewd to
have bound himself as a hostage unless he had been looking for a public
issue on which to challenge the king.

Besides armed conflict, the Peace of Bruges, which was itself circulated
in print, produced a literary conflict. Philip of Cleves put out a j ustification ;
but the most pungent manifesto was launched by Ghent with the col-
laboration of France under the pseudonym of Philalites in answer to a
memorial which Maximilian addressed in July 1488 to the estates of
Hainault.

The imperial army retired in July from before Ghent, which erected the
Rabot, a fortified sluice, to commemorate the event; and in September
1488 Philip of Cleves entered Brussels, where he had the Peace of Bruges
proclaimed. The opponents of Maximilian looked to be winning; and
Henry VII received their envoys in August. The belief grew that the king
of the Romans would accept an indemnity and depart from the Nether-
lands. ‘The Union’ of 1488 reconstructed the alliance of 1482-3 against
Maximilian. With the notable exception of Antwerp the towns of Brabant
were almost wholly on the side of Ghent, which was backed as in 1482-3
by a mixture of Burgundian aristocrats and lawyers.

Despite his qualities as a soldier and his connection with foreign
dynasties, such as Portugal, Philip of Cleves was politically less important
in directing the movement against Maximilian than Jan Coppenhole of
Ghent, who came to Brussels in the autumn of 1488 to impose the authority
of Ghent as he had already done on lesser towns.

In February 1489 Maximilian retreated to Germany, leaving as his
lieutenant Albert duke of Saxony, an able leader of mercenaries and
skilful at conducting the negotiations that throughout accompanied the
civil war. Even before it faced so formidable an adversary as Albert of
Saxony, ‘The Union’ was losing, for it had to win quickly if it was to win
at all, since the towns of Brabant were overcrowded with refugee peasants.
Moreover, although it claimed to act in the name of the Archduke Philip,
the prince naturel was kept safely for Maximilian at Malines, where his
presence was invaluable for drawing loyalism away from ‘The Union’.
The disturbances in Holland, where the leaders of the Hoek party joined
hands with Philip of Cleves and took to the sea to exercise piracy, did not
influence the course of events so much as France.

The Peace of Bruges restored the Peace of Arras, and ‘ The Union ’ was
placed under the personal surety of Charles VIII; but French intervention
against Maximilian was cautious, because of French designs on Brittany
and French suspicions of Ghent. Long before the duke of Brittany died

l8 237 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

in September 1488, the regent of France, Anne de Beaujeu, and her
council were determined to secure for the Crown the Breton succession;
perceiving, therefore, that their military resources were insufficient to
wage simultaneous war in Flanders and Brittany they reserved their
might for Brittany. The Netherlands became a side-show in French eyes
when, after the Peace of Bruges, they could not be used by Maximilian
as a base from which to launch an invasion. The defeat of Maximilian,
however, came to be seen as conducive to the supremacy of Ghent rather
than of France in the Low Countries. The strained relations came to a
head at a conference in February 1489 between d’Esquerdes and Coppen-
hole. In return for continued aid, France demanded the submission of
Ghent in the form of the payment of a large sum to d’Esquerdes, osten-
sibly in settlement of a debt, and the transfer to him of two notabilities
seized as hostages when Maximilian was taken at Bruges. The French
received no satisfaction, while the alliance of Maximilian with Henry VII
(February 1489) and the growing military success of Albert of Saxony
in Brabant deterred them from committing themselves more deeply in
the Netherlands. After months of negotiations, in which Engelbert of
Nassau, who was still a prisoner in France, acted as Maximilian’s
diplomatic agent, a treaty was concluded at Frankfurt (22 July 1489)
between Charles VIII and the king of the Romans.

The purpose of the French Crown was to bring about the neutralisation
of Brittany, to prepare the duchy for penetration. In return for this
Charles VIII was ready to facilitate under his mediation the return of
Ghent and her allies to Habsburg obedience. The news from Frankfurt
decided Brabant to submit and pay a fine to Albert of Saxony. Even
Ghent, although undefeated, bowed to the Valois monarchy; and in
accordance with the Frankfurt terms Flanders sent Gruuthuse, Rassen-
ghem and Jan Coppenhole to negotiate at Tours. Maximilian despatched
thither a numerous mission, of which the ambassadors of consequence
were Engelbert of Nassau, premier chambellan, who since his captivity in
France had gained for himself and his family a controlling position in
Franco-Burgundian diplomacy, and Frans van Busleyden, maitre des
requetes, the archduke’s tutor, who now undertook his first major task.

The treaty of 30 October at Montils-lez-Tours abrogated the Peace of
Bruges. The Members of Flanders were to pay within three years a huge
indemnity, and in terms of any monetary revaluation which the govern-
ment of the Low Countries might introduce. The Peace of Arras, which
at Frankfurt was maintained, was now superseded, and, despite the protest
of the Flemish delegation, the liberties granted since the death of Charles
the Bold were to be reviewed at a personal interview between Charles VIII
and Maximilian.

As the French knew, this was only a formal pacification, for Ghent was
unconquered and Coppenhole and his party unreconciled, while Philip of

238

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I52I

Cleves, though at his own request included within the peace, refused to
recognise any authority that did not restore him to all his lands, offices
and pensions, above all his captaincy of Sluis, to which he now retired.
The restoration of authority in Flanders and Holland was largely wrecked
by a revaluation of the currency under an ordinance of 14 December 1489.
Since the death of Charles the Bold the coinage had declined in value,
aggravating prices already at the mercy of war conditions, and the estates
notably in 1488 had concerned themselves with proposals for reform.
Technically the ordinance of 1489 produced a sound money, but it was
also devised to enhance the value to the government of taxation and, as
the reference in the treaty already showed, of the indemnity payable by
Flanders. The debased coins in circulation lost anything up to 66 per cent
of their value; and coming before Christmas, when leases, provincial and
municipal rentes had to be paid, the ordinance caused hardship and
litigation which lasted a decade. For more than a year the currency
question caused recriminations with Ghent and contributed to keep in
power Coppenhole, who was waiting for a turn in the international
situation to reopen the struggle.

It was disastrous that, owing to his personal quarrel with Maximilian,
Philip of Cleves was not reinstated, however exorbitant his demands.
Thanks to his command of Sluis, Philip now became a more dangerous
opponent of the regime than Coppenhole. From Sluis Philip expanded
piratical operations, killing the trade of Bruges and severely interfering
with that of Holland, where thanks to the resulting distress he succeeded
in keeping rebellion alive. Politically the rekindling of revolt in Bruges
was unimportant. The wealthy classes, knowing the contest to be hopeless,
migrated from Bruges, which capitulated on 29 November 1490. At
Ghent also the wealthy, among them Adrian Vilain, lord of Rassenghem,
were coming to terms with the central government ; but Cleves sent Ras-
senghem a personal cartel of defiance and caused his murder in June 1490.

The final revolt of Ghent, under the leadership of Coppenhole, might
never have happened had not Maximilian resumed his quarrel with
France, by implementing the plan, projected as long ago as i486, of
marrying the heiress of Brittany. On 19 December 1490 the king of the
Romans married by proxy Anne duchess of Brittany. French intervention
in the Netherlands inevitably restarted and Ghent, always ready to use
France, was again in open revolt by May 1491.

The Valois scored an indecent triumph over the Habsburgs when in
December 1491 Charles VIII married Maximilian’s bride the duchess of
Brittany and repudiated his daughter Margaret, to whom Charles was
betrothed under the peace of 1482. The Estates General had to be
gathered together in February 1492 at Malines to negotiate peace with
Ghent. Philip of Cleves had rejected numerous peace offers since 1489,
hoping to appeal to the estates over the head of the archduke’s council.

239 18-i

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

But Philip in 1492 was out-moded. The Golden Fleece and the learned
members of the archduke’s council rejected his old-fashioned approach
to a sovereign on terms of equality; and the estates, who were in close
relation with the council, treated his apologia as a petition and surrendered
their copies of it to the chancellor. Unlike 1488 the estates wanted to save
the central power. The fact that the archduke, the prince naturel, would
come of age in a few years, counted for much.

Philip of Cleves and Coppenhole had no political answer to the estates’
request for them to choose between civil war and peace although they
could still count on the government being embarrassed by other local
rebellions. 1492 was one of the most difficult years since 1477, for a revolt
broke out in Holland, and the precariousness of the Burgundian inherit-
ance was proved by the return of Charles of Egmond to Guelders.

The movement in Holland and West Friesland was not a peasant revolt.
It adopted for its banner not the plough or wooden shoe, the symbols of
insurgent peasants, but cheese and bread to proclaim that the country
was not to be eaten up by tax-farmers. The rising was a violent protest by
rural communities and towns such as Alkmaar and Haarlem against the
prevalent system which farmed taxation to syndicates of financiers, who
advanced money to the government. The ‘ Kaas-en-Broodvolk ’ were
vanquished by German mercenaries under a banner of bread and beer
and the rebellion was over by June 1492. Its chief importance was to
bring about the decline of the Hoek party as a fighting faction, for the
pacification led to stricter government in Holland so that the remaining
Hoeks were absorbed among the allies of Guelders.

The loss of Guelders, which was not definitely reconquered until 1 543,
was the work of French diplomacy playing upon local particularism.
Charles of Egmond was sent back to Guelders in February 1492, under
the familiar French plan of raising up enemies for Burgundians or
Habsburgs within the Low Countries. Charles had cause for grievance
in that Maximilian had done nothing to secure his release from captivity
since 1487, while the cadet branch of his family, Egmond of IJsselstein
held the office of stadhouder of Holland from 1484 to 1517. Particularism
is a frequently misapplied term, but it is applicable to Guelders, which
in 1492 reverted to the medieval ideal of self-sufficiency under an hereditary
lord. From the start the estates of Guelders were associated with Charles
in the struggle that brought the country out of the wider Netherlands in
which it had lived since 1473 and back to the condition of a fief.

After marrying Anne of Brittany, Charles VIII not only clung to Artois
and Franche-Comte, the dower of the repudiated Margaret of Austria,
but to wring concessions from her family detained Margaret as a hostage.
The European situation, on the other hand, was changing in favour of the
Habsburgs. The success of the French monarchy in Brittany, which
Henry VII and Ferdinand of Aragon strove to reverse, brought attacks

240

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-152I

which had to be bought off with French concessions to England (Treaty
of Staples, 3 November 1492) and to Spain (Treaty of Barcelona,
19 January 1493). Maximilian allied with Henry VII and the Catholic
kings of Spain ; and his alliance with Spain is memorable for the overtures
of a marriage between the Archduke Philip and a Spanish princess, which,
although abandoned under the Treaty of Barcelona, ushered in the dynastic
marriage of 1496.

By repudiating Margaret of Austria, the king of France destroyed his
status in the eyes of the Burgundian lands through tearing up the Peace
of Arras. In Artois and Franche-Comte, the dower counties of Margaret,
that Burgundian loyalty, which had never perished, now became aggres-
sive; and in November 1492 Arras rose against its French garrison, and
to the cry of ‘ Vive Bourgogne ’ rejoined the Netherlands. Maximilian’s
invasion of Franche-Comte in midwinter succeeded more because of the
co-operation which the towns gave him than because of the small battle
at Doumon (19 January 1493) that he won over the French.

Confidence in the viability of the Burgundian State, accompanied
everywhere, except in Guelders, by the decay of any ideological alternative,
proved decisive in restoring peace. Ghent, although militarily unsubdued,
submitted to terms equal to those imposed after its defeat in 1453 and
1485. Bitterness between artisans and peasantry culminated in the murder
of Coppenhole (16 June 1492) by the captain of the peasants, nicknamed
‘ploughman’. Despite this internal strife, Ghent was yet capable of
inflicting a sharp repulse on Albert of Saxony, but, conscious that a town
could not indefinitely defy a state, opened negotiations. The resulting
Peace of Cadzand (29 July 1492) reduced Ghent from an autonomous to
an ordinary town. Its jurisdiction was subordinated to the appellate
powers of the Raad van Vlaanderen, and its right to create external
burghers confined to narrow limits. In his capacity of count of Flanders,
the prince secured a permanent influence over the annual reappointment
of magistrates, who were to be drawn from the notables and not from the
lesser guilds. As Pirenne has said, ‘the prince was to control the town
and the town its trades Although the plan of Charles the Bold to overawe
Ghent by building a castle was not implemented until after the next revolt
of 1539, the town remained unrebellious for a generation.

The waning of French intervention was obvious from events in the
bishopric of Liege. After his short-lived triumph of 1485, Maximilian
had connived at the putting to death of the Mambour Guillaume de la
Marck by the bishop John of Hoorne. Such summary justice only relit
the family feud between Hoorne and La Marck; and at the apogee of
‘The Union’ in October 1488, Charles VIII took Liege under French
protection. A local civil war between the bishop and the La Marck party
roughly kept pace with the major struggle between Maximilian and ‘ The
Union’. The advantages of neutrality were slow to be appreciated; and

241

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

it was not until the Peace of Donchery (5 May 1492) that the warring
factions and the estates were brought to accept neutrality and free trade
for Liege. These principles for the status of the bishopric were recognised
by Charles VIII in July 1492 and a month later by the archduke. The
neutrality of Liege, however interesting for the development of inter-
national law, signified at the time a compromise solution which drew the
Pays de Liege to closer relations with the Burgundian lands at the expense
of French diplomacy.

The capitulation of Philip of Cleves came on 12 October 1492 after a
lengthy siege of Sluis. At sea the government was weak ; and its admiral
Philip of Beveren acquiesced in ships of his own port Veere buying safe-
conducts from the pirates of Sluis. Henry VII, however, was impatient
at the damage they wrought on English trade, and under his alliance with
Maximilian sent a fleet commanded by Sir Edward Poynings to help
Albert of Saxony prosecute the siege. Philip of Cleves could not there-
after hold out indefinitely; but his submission was actually caused by
the death of his father driving him to open negotiations for the preservation
of his patrimony. Thanks to the solidarity of his fellow magnates, he was
reinstated ; but Philip was too wise ever to attack monarchical society
again, and although he remained until his death in 1528 an exponent of
peace with France he pursued it by more subtle means.

The re-establishment of normal relations with France was obstructed
by Burgundian refugees at the French court; but the Peace of Senlis
(23 May 1493) preserved the essentials of the Peace of Arras. France
returned Margaret and her dower, Artois and Franche-Comte, which
without the duchy of Burgundy constituted only a minor risk to French
security. The Habsburgs, on the other hand, implicitly renounced war as
a legitimate means for recovering the duchy of Burgundy ; for while both
parties reserved their rights under the Peace of Arras, they agreed to seek
satisfaction ‘ par voye amiable ’ or 'par justice ’. The permanent suzerainty
and jurisdiction of the Crown of France was recognised in respect of all
the French fiefs of the archduke; and pending his doing homage at the
age of twenty, a condominium was devised for such strong points as Aire,
Bethune and Hesdin, the military government of which was to be exercised
by d’Esquerdes for Charles VIII while the civil administration rested
with the archduke. Starting therefore from the medieval principle of
divided jurisdiction an army of occupation was installed to protect the
French northern frontier until 1498.

The clauses of 1482 favouring capitalists including the beneficed clergy
were expanded. On both sides property owners were reinstated, but were
denied the right to recover income disposed of by either state since 1470.
The stability that characterised the relations between France and the
Netherlands in the opening sixteenth century owed much to the economic
provisions of 1493, which allowed for the holding of property on either

242

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I521

side of the frontier and the abolition of safe-conducts for merchants.
It is not surprising that the Peace, like the Peace of Arras before it, was
published in print, seeing the number of individual interests which it
involved.

Senlis heralded the end of Maximilian’s regency. Frans van Busleyden
and Thomas de Plaine, two of the most influential ministers of his son’s
reign, helped to negotiate it; and when Margaret of Austria, returning
from France, was welcomed at Valenciennes, a play was performed in
the pastoral style representing the country recovering from its plight.

The Emperor Frederick III died in August 1493 ; and the estates, who
used Guillaume de Croy lord of Chievres as their envoy, found Maximilian
ready to accept the sum which they proffered as the price of Philip’s
emancipation. The ordinance of October 1493, which replaced Albert of
Saxony by Engelbert of Nassau at the head of the archduke’s council,
marks the beginning of Philip’s independent government. In keeping
with Burgundian precedent, justice and finance were kept within the
orbit of his household, but Maximilian’s instructions for liaison between
Philip’s council in the Netherlands and his own in Austria remained
inoperative.

Philip’s accession did more than close the constitutional crisis persisting
since 1482, for the inaugural charters under which his reign began
resumed in each of the major territories prerogative power granted away
by Mary in 1477. The Blijde Inkomst of 10 September 1494 on his re-
ception as duke of Brabant only admitted usages current before 1477 ;
although he agreed to grant additions, which the estates of the duchy
unanimously proposed and his council deemed useful. The estates of
Holland were forced to meet him in December 1494 at the inconvenient
town of Geertruidenberg, where he all but abrogated the Groot Privilegie
of Holland dating from 1477 ; but he was prepared to consider the sugges-
tions of the province, and granted some additions in 1495. Philip rebuffed
Flanders, where he had been acknowledged count in 1483, by sending
proctors to take possession ; and in Hainault, when he swore to be good
lord comme vray heritier et proprietaire du pays, he revoked the privileges
gained by Mons since 1477.

Thomas de Plaine, president du grand conseil {grand, implying its legal
side) had so much to do with the negotiations in Brabant, Holland and
Hainault, that he may have been responsible for the principle underlying
the revision of the 1477 charters. The sovereign was not bound by his
predecessor’s concessions, and liberties were not an immutable birthright
of subjects; but the additions which Philip issued aimed at introducing
efficiency rather than absolutism, for joint responsibility could not
always be enforced on the Members of a single territory. In December
1494 Holland was promised a new assessment of taxation and Philip’s

243

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

commissioners produced a survey ( Informatie ) contrasting population and
property in the northern parts of Holland with what they had been in
1477. Taxation caused a suit between Dordrecht, claiming a reduced rate
on the strength of its charters, and the other towns of Holland, who,
maintaining that ‘in public matters the minor must follow the major
part’, strove to compel Dordrecht to pay at the same rate as themselves.
In 1497 an interlocutory sentence of Philip’s council left Dordrecht in
a strong position at the cost of the public fisc.

The foreign policy of the reign falls into two phases dividing at 1500.
In the first, Philip found himself in a favourable international conjunction.
French pressure, continuous since 1461, was diverted toward Italy; and
the lord of Esquerdes, who died on Charles VIII’s march to Italy, left his
body to be buried at Boulogne as a protest against the new direction of
French expansionism.

The basic problem in the foreign relations of the Netherlands, how to
combine political peace with France and economic peace with England,
that Maximilian, unlike the Valois dukes, disregarded, became capable
of solution. French and English outlooks were represented within Philip’s
council, for if Chievres and Frans van Busleyden leaned to France, the
family of Bergen espoused the English cause out of regard for the trade
of their town Bergen-op-zoom.

Philip began his reign by recognising the Peace of Senlis, and imple-
mented its consequences by the Treaty of Paris (2 August 1498). In 1499
at Arras he performed homage for Flanders and Artois to the chancellor
of France representing Louis XII.

Against Henry VII, Maximilian was committed to the diplomatically
sterile and commercially disastrous support of Margaret of York’s
pretender Perkin Warbeck. While Warbeck’s venture was in progress,
Philip’s government in 1495 set about persuading Henry VII to raise the
economic sanctions, which he had imposed against the Low Countries;
and on 24 February 1496 a trade treaty, generally known as the Intercursus
Magnus was reached between them. Besides restoring the charges on
English merchants to the rates of fifty years before, the treaty conferred
on Philip absolute control of foreign affairs, by prohibiting unfriendly
preparations against Henry VII within franchises, such as Malines, the
dower town of Margaret of York.

In the second phase of foreign policy that began after 1 500 the Nether-
lands were subordinated to the realisation of the archduke’s inheritance
in Spain. Initially the marriage (20 October 1496) of Philip to Juana, the
daughter of the Catholic kings of Spain, and of Margaret of Austria to the
infante in 1497, constituted a diplomatic success of Maximilian, and a
renewal of the Burgundian connection with the Peninsula that ante-dated
1477 ; but when Don Miguel, the last male heir of Ferdinand and Isabella,
died in 1500, the archduke became by right of his wife heir to the Spanish

244

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I52I

crowns, and when Isabella herself died (26 November 1504) he assumed
the title of King of Castille.

Friendship with France and England was cultivated no longer for
the sake of the Low Countries, but to secure the acquiescence of these
Powers in Philip’s succession to the Catholic kings. Toward France the
archduke’s attitude became servile, but at least it succeeded in keeping
Louis XII until the summer of 1505 from seriously impeding his Spanish
plans.

Philip undertook two visits to Spain. Firstly, he left the Netherlands
in November 1501 only to return in November 1503, and secondly he
sailed for Spain in January 1506 to die there 25 September 1506. The first
visit was prepared by Chievres and Busleyden who arranged the Treaty
of Lyons (10 August 1501) with Louis XII. Philip’s decision to travel to
Spain through France was a triumph for the francophil party within his
council. His entry into Paris recalled that of his great-grandfather in
1461, and formed the subject of a printed relation and ballad. As senior
peer of France he attended the Parlement of Paris, demonstrating not only
his feudal dependence on, but his personal status within, the kingdom.

The second visit to Spain was prepared by the treaty of Hagenau
(8 April 1505) between Maximilian, Philip and Louis XII; but the king
of France woke up to the implications of a Habsburg on his Somme and
Pyrenean frontiers. Philip had to go to Spain by sea; and the virulent
return of French intervention in the Low Countries dates not from the
second regency of Maximilian after Philip’s death, but from the latter
half of 1505. Juridically Louis XII pressed the rights of the Parlement of
Paris over the ressort de Flandres ; diplomatically he supported the La
Marcks at Liege and militarily he aided Charles duke of Guelders, whom
France had never wholly dropped. The Spanish succession was a gamble
by the court of Burgundy for stakes higher than those for which other
powers contended in Italy, but the Netherlands financed it and bore the
brunt of the reaction it evoked from France.

As in France and England so also in the Low Countries the business
of government proved easier in the opening sixteenth century than for
some generations, and very much easier than it became in the later part
of the century, so that Philip’s facile manners made him almost as popular
as Louis XII. He strove for harmony even as a boy; and in 1492, before
the attack on Sluis, he sent a message to Philip of Cleves, ‘ dittes a Monsieur
Philippe qu’il ne me face faire chose dont je puisse avoir regret cy-apres’.
Subsequent admiration for the autocratic type has rendered his nick-
name croit conseil pejorative, but at the time it denoted a wise prince,
who, unlike a Charles the Bold, was prepared to heed counsel.

Certainly the nobility increased its public influence; but at the same
time, despite its cosmopolitan origin, it was growing to identify itself
with the provinces. The members of the Bergen, Croy, Lalaing, Lannoy

245

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

and Nassau families who surrounded Philip made his political council
(i conseil prive) resemble a gathering of the Golden Fleece. The state had
much in common with an oligarchic republic like Venice.

The archduke returned not only to the pomp of his Burgundian fore-
fathers, but to their residences. Confident in his subjects’ loyalty, he spent
1498 at the Coudenberg, Brussels, and reconciled himself with the Flemings
by going to the Prinsenhof, Ghent, where his son Charles was born in
February 1 500. The towns, with exceptions like Antwerp, laboured under
the aftermath of civil war, and were grateful to receive state aid in the
supervision of their debts, for between 1494 and 1500 most of the towns
of Holland became bankrupt.

Because his outlook, unlike that of Charles the Bold, was peaceful,
and because the central authority tended on the whole to be exercised
through, rather than at the expense of, provincial institutions, measures,
which in autocratic spirit could compare with those of Charles, were
introduced without much difficulty. An act of resumption (Edict of
6 May 1495) reclaimed all regalian revenues and rights in Holland and
Zeeland lapsed since 1477. Besides lands and offices that had been
alienated, it included all tolls which had been farmed out; these were not
only financially valuable (for example, those in the Scheldt estuary), but
of political importance in the relations of the provinces with one another
and with foreign Powers (for example, England).

The regime was not doctrinaire as regards centralisation. In 1496 the
Chambre des Comptes at Lille and its equivalents at Brussels and The
Hague were compulsorily reunited, as before 1477, in headquarters at
Malines ; and Philip told the estates of Brabant that what they called their
Rekenkamer was in fact his. But by the end of 1498 the accounting
bureaux were back in their provincial homes, for once the prince’s power
had been admitted he was ready to compromise with local feeling.
Philip’s two confidential ministers, Chievres and Frans van Busleyden
(died August 1 502) had a head for business as well as diplomacy.

The creation of the Grand Conseil at Malines (22 January 1504) ostensibly
did little more than provide a fixed residence for the prince’s grand conseil,
the legal section of his council ; but the verbatim repetition of Charles the
Bold’s act of 1473 instituting the Parlement of Malines suggests that in
founding a high court at Malines Philip was inspired by statecraft more
than convenience. Philip’s early death cut short the experiment of re-
introducing legal centralisation, and the Raad van Brabant, to mention
only the most important provincial rival of Malines, freed itself from the
appellate jurisdiction of the Grand Conseil.

Official relations with the Estates General were satisfactory, and,
because Philip, unlike his father and grandfather, often communicated
with them personally, their suspicion of the court was diminished. In
September 1501 he bade farewell to them and announced the appointment

246

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I52I

of Engelbert of Nassau as lieutenant during his forthcoming visit to Spain.
The estates were a collection of provincial deputations, and notwith-
standing the consequent delay and bargaining in securing an aide the
government allowed these deputations time to refer back to their provincial
mandatories, so that the reign of Philip and the minority of Charles were
a period when, however grudgingly, taxation was raised with the consent
of the individual provinces. The estates no longer, as during Philip’s
minority, shaped policy. Even when that policy was congenial to them
(e.g. the Treaty of Paris in 1498), it was settled by Philip’s council and
only subsequently laid before them. After 1501 they displayed increasing
restiveness over paying for his foreign policy; but they could always be
relied upon to support Philip against interference from Maximilian.

In internal as in external matters, Philip completely freed himself from
paternal control. Although when Maximilian summoned Philip in 1496
to Germany Busleyden was temporarily disgraced, he was quickly
restored; and next year, 1497, Philip replaced Maximilian’s old chancellor
Jean Carandolet by Thomas de Plaine, another franc-comtois, but one
wholly devoted to his interests. In 1498-9 and again early in 1503, while
the king of the Romans was seeking to subdue Guelders, Philip and the
estates clung to neutrality toward Charles of Egmond as a corollary of
their alliance with France, even to the extent of permitting the passage of
French reinforcements to Guelders.

Only in the summer of 1505, by which time Philip had displaced his
father in the leadership of the Habsburg family, did he embark on the one
campaign of his career, invading Guelders with Maximilian and forcing
the capitulation of Charles of Egmond (July 1505), who was reduced to
his pre-1487 status of a client hostage at the Burgundian court. The
mildness of the settlement would not have been open to criticism if Charles
had been properly guarded; but rather than go with Philip to Spain he
managed to flee back to Guelders, where he could count on the full
support of Louis XII.

So impatient was Philip to reach Spain, that he sailed from Flushing
on 10 January 1506, although the outlook at home was more dangerous
than at any time since 1493, for Louis XII controlled the entire length of
the Meuse. Apart from the return of Charles to Guelders, French
influence scored a success at Liege on the death of the bishop John of
Hoorne. On 30 December 1505, Frard de la Marck, nephew of the one-
time Mambour Guillaume, and the candidate of Louis XII, was elected to
the bishopric by the chapter of St Lambert against the Habsburg nominee
Jacques de Croy. For some months before he sailed, Philip was collecting
money to pay for the expedition by mortgaging parcels of the domain, and
by selling, in all but name, to Antwerp, Middelburg and Bergen-op-zoom
the dues on the Scheldt resumed in May 1495.

The domain and tolls were considered mortgageable in an emergency

247

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

like crown jewels; and in 1499 Philip ceded, as count of Holland, his
rights over Friesland to Albert of Saxony in satisfaction of the debt
owing to Albert in respect of his former military command. Although
Margaret of Austria and Charles V recovered without undue difficulty
what Philip had pawned, his liquidation of regalian assets to furnish
money for Spain was a set-back to the policy pursued since 1494 of build-
ing up the prerogative. Two treaties with Henry VII interrupted Philip’s
voyage to Spain. The first (20 March 1 506) was purely dynastic securing
English support for Philip’s rights in Castille. The second (30 April) was
made after he had left England and was never ratified by him. It has
acquired the name of Intercursus Malus because of the advantage it
conferred on English trade. Taken together they afford evidence of the
lengths to which Philip and his council were prepared to go in order to
gain diplomatic and pecuniary support for his Spanish policy. That policy
had already achieved unexpected success when Philip died suddenly in
Spain on 25 September 1506.

The minority of Charles is a more realistic title for the period 1506-15
than the second regency of Maximilian. The emperor, as Max called
himself after 1507, visited the Low Countries twice, in 1508-9 and 1513,
and drew a monthly pension from them while retaining the appointment
of officials in order to reap further profits. But the role, which Maximilian
played during Philip’s minority of embroiling the provinces in warfare,
fell during Charles’s to Margaret of Austria. The internal resistance to
the waging of foreign wars, which had previously come from the towns
and the estates, now sprang from within the conseil privi. Society was
growing more unified ; and the existence of a powerful pro-French party
within the State explains the decline of French influence exercised from
without. In any event the efforts of Louis XII to draw the towns on to
the side of France failed in 1507 and 1513, while the nobles and lawyers
no longer produced numerous deserters to France as in the time of
Maximilian’s first regency.

To call the party in the conseil prive and the Golden Fleece, which
opposed Margaret’s wars of reconquest and rebuffed in 1 508 the emperor’s
attempt to set up Franche-Comte as a kingdom and to revive in 15 11 the
vanished realm of Austrasia, a national party would be too facile. Rather
did this party see in peace with France the solution to difficulties at home,
and wanted relations with England confined to trade without entailing
dynastic — let alone military — alliances, while striving for the solution of
the Guelders problem by marrying Isabella, Charles’s sister, to Charles
of Egmond. Chievres, who developed from feudal lord and courtier into
a European statesman, was the exponent of this outlook. The rival group
within the conseil prive and Golden Fleece led by Jan van Bergen and
Floris van Egmond of IJsselstein, which advocated a warlike settlement

248

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, 1477-I521

with Guelders and France, could claim to be equally patriotic, for the
English alliance which they advocated had conferred no mean benefits
in the past. The two factions, the pro-French led by Chievres, whose
family interests lay mainly in Hainault, and the pro-English headed by
Bergen and IJsselstein in the north of Brabant and in Holland, might
suggest a rivalry between north and south. But the aristocratic politics
of the day did not proceed on these lines ; and the Nassau family, whose
centre in the Netherlands was at Breda, remained francophil up to and
beyond the Treaty of Paris (1515). The one sense in which Chievres and
his supporters might qualify for the epithet patriotic is in their emphasis
on the prince naturel. They were the party of status quo, aiming to preserve
the conditions obtaining at Philip’s death until Charles came of age to
enter on his inheritance; and on this account they commanded the
sympathy of the estates.

It is a tribute to the methods by which the restoration of monarchical
rule was pursued under Philip that there was no reaction in 1506 com-
parable to that of 1477. The estates did not renew their former attempts
to produce an alternative constitution ; and the foresight of Margaret of
Austria avoided later clashes, though the situation was often ugly. In
1508 the provinces swore to remain united and afford each other aid,
ominously reminiscent of 1488, but Margaret produced the Peace of
Cambrai as a sedative. Apart from their opposition to a war policy, the
Estates General were conservative and divided by provincial jealousies.
One of Margaret’s first tasks was to arbitrate in a dispute over precedence
between Brabant and Flanders, and in 1508 Bergen advised her to deal
with the provinces separately rather than in a general assembly.

Together with that of Chievres the personality of Margaret explains
the ensuing political history. Her knowledge and patronage of the arts
were too extensive for recapitulation; but politics interested her most,
and after the death of her last husband, the duke of Savoy, in 1504, she
was anxious to return and govern the Netherlands for either Philip or
Maximilan. Her hostility to the Crown of France was no mere personal
rancour deriving from her rejection by Charles VIII, but sprang from her
Burgundian dynasticism, for while she knew that the Netherlands made
the fortune of her family she thought of Dijon as its capital. At first she
had little sympathy with the political traditions of the Low Countries.
Her methods were exotic, and she relied on such men as Mercurino di
Gattinara, whom she brought from Savoy trained in the cabinets of Italy.

The conseil prive with Chievres at its head, whom Philip had left be-
hind as his lieutenant, quickly supplied an answer to the constitutional
question raised by the succession of Philip’s son Charles count of Luxem-
burg, aged six, commonly called the archduke. On 6 and 7 October 1506
the councillors wrote begging Maximilian to accept the regency, indicating
firmly that this solution would have to be submitted at once to the estates.

249

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

They followed the practice of Philip’s reign in deciding policy and taking
the estates into their confidence afterwards. Maximilian’s decision of
27 October 1506 to maintain Philip’s councillors in power enabled them
to keep the administration running by retaining provisionally in office
the staff of the Chambre des Comptes and of the Raad van Vlaanderen.

At the estates of October 1 506 the council only won partial acceptance
for the regency of Maximilian. Brabant and Holland agreed; but the
Flemish deputation asked for time to consult its mandatories, while
Hainault and Namur hesitated from fear of France. Louis XII hoped,
perhaps expected, to become Charles’s guardian. Not until the estates of
April 1507 was Maximilian recognised as regent, no doubt because he
commissioned meanwhile (18 March 1507) his daughter Margaret to take
the oath for him as mambour. In doing so he granted her minimal inde-
pendence, and not until 18 March 1509 could she elicit from him the
powers of a regent. Her position was the more delicate in that she could
only govern through the conseil prive, which retained the influence it
acquired under Philip, and although theoretically an advisory body
actually shared power with the head of the State. Margaret never gained
control over the composition of the council during Charles’s minority.
When the old chancellor Thomas de Plaine died in 1507 she could not
prevent Jean le Sauvage becoming chef et president du conseil prive,
which under a minority was equivalent to being chancellor. Le Sauvage
was not a franc-comtois, but a Flemish jurist conspicuous in dealings with
France since 1494.

While there was hope of becoming Charles’s guardian, Louis XII
imposed a truce on the duke of Guelders and Erard de la Marck, bishop
of Liege, but once Maximilian’s regency was inevitable he again supplied
them with arms and troops. Margaret turned to England, and in
December 1507 Bergen, as the leading anglophil in the council, negotiated
an alliance for her at Calais. But Henry VII was not the king to furnish
military aid, so that Margaret’s first attempt to challenge France and
conquer Guelders failed, evoking in 1508 demands for peace from the
estates of Brabant. By the Peace of Cambrai (10 December 1508) she
brought about a coalition between the emperor and the king of France.
The Netherlands gained a respite, for the duke of Guelders had to accept
the terms and the coalition turned to war against Venice. Although
Margaret trimmed the Peace of Cambrai by a pact with England, con-
cluding (17 December 1508) a marriage treaty for Charles with Mary
Tudor, the pro-French were inevitably strengthened, and the emperor,
who was sensitive to such trends, made Chievres premier chambellan to
Charles. Margaret in vain sought for Bergen this vital post, which enabled
Chievres to preside over the bringing up of the prince naturel.

To the party of status quo Cambrai was to be a permanent peace like
Senlis, but to the regent Margaret it was a temporary expedient. When,

250

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, 1477-I52I

therefore, the succession of Henry VIII offered her a promising ally, she
used the infractions of the peace by Charles of Egmond to wreck the
negotiations with Guelders and to inflate the local conflict into an
international one by a military alliance with England against Guelders
in 15 1 1. An English force arrived to help Margaret’s troops besiege
Venlo; but Charles of Egmond invaded Holland, and in November 15 n
the siege had to be raised.

The introduction of English forces was a challenge to the party of
status quo. In July 15 11 the regent complained that councillors de robe
courte et longue withdrew ; and by the end of the year the captain of her
land forces, Henry of Nassau, and the admiral Philip of Burgundy
(youngest bastard of Philip le Bon) were pretexting sickness in order to
be relieved of their commands. Although she persuaded the emperor to
dismiss Le Sauvage, and make Gerard de Plaine, son of the late chancellor,
president du conseil prive (November 15 11), the party of status quo had
demonstrated its power to frustrate official policy.

The regent extricated herself by a concession to the nobility and to all
who saw in Charles the head of the state. In April 1512 she set up a
princely household for the archduke. Flouting the emperor’s wish to
surround his grandson with a single set of permanent officials, she based
Charles’s enlarged household on the etat a demi-an, which kept none but
the highest officers continuously at court, while the rest performed duties
for half the year, being replaced in the other half by a second set of officers.
Margaret perceived that to please the nobility profits from court service
must be spread widely. In Adrian of Utrecht, whom she chose as tutor
for her nephew in preference to Erasmus, Margaret provided Charles
with his future minister, who in the meanwhile exercised a formative
influence on his religious and intellectual development. The regent was
the readier to make these concessions, since she deemed the time ripe to
reverse the Peace of Cambrai and bring the emperor, the kings of England
and Aragon into a military coalition against France.

Already in July 1512 she told her father that the provinces existed on
trade and peace, and, realising that they would resist positive participation
in a war with France, she preferred to declare them neutral and wage war
with foreign armies and funds. Neutrality was not new in principle but
to extend it to exclude the Netherlands and Franche-Comte (the latter,
Margaret’s dower, already declared neutral August 1512) from major
war was quite different from the neutrality of episcopal Liege. In April
1513 the emperor was induced to enter a Holy League with the pope,
Henry VIII and Ferdinand of Aragon against France. The neutrality of
the Netherlands was saved by a quibble, for Maximilian subscribed to the
league only as emperor and not as guardian of his grandson, whose
hereditary lands were thus excluded. Louis XII remarked that if Charles
had been of age he would have been summoned as a vassal to defend France.

251

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The regent’s unusual formula for waging an aggressive war succeeded
chiefly because the Swiss thrust at Dijon forced Louis XII to fight
simultaneously on two fronts, while Henry VIII provided both an army
and money for the emperor. Although many pro-English noblemen
took service with Henry VIII, the main business of the Netherlands was
supplying the armies ; and Margaret was probably near the truth when she
claimed in 1515 that they had made a million of gold in profiteering.
Tournai, the fortified French enclave on the Scheldt, fell to Henry VIII
(21 September 1513), and Margaret was glad to see him keep it, for
Tournai committed Henry to a stake in the Low Countries, and England
was the corner-stone of Margaret’s policy.

A new household ordinance for Archduke Charles was promulgated
at Lille in October 1513, which internationalised the prince naturel by
sharing his guardianship between Maximilian, Henry VIII and Ferdinand
of Aragon. This dynastic consortium, under which Charles was placed,
thinly disguised an English alliance that was to prolong Margaret’s tenure
of the regency and weaken Chievres and the pro-French group around
Charles. Undertakings were exchanged at Lille that the marriage of
Charles to Mary, Henry VIII’s sister, should take place by May 1514;
but the pro-French and pro-Castilian party entrenched in the conseil
prive and the Golden Fleece delayed it beyond the stipulated date. When
therefore, in August 1514, Henry VIII announced the marriage of Mary
to Louis XII, the entire outlook was altered; and it became obvious that
Margaret could not long retain her position as regent. Chievres brought
the archduke away from Malines, the home of dowagers and lawyers, to
Brussels and new associations.

The estates of Brabant grumbled against paying any aide until Charles
was declared of age; but when at the end of 1514 the Estates General
offered the emperor a large sum in return for Charles’s emancipation,
Maximilian was as amenable as in 1493 under similar circumstances.
Under his authority dated 23 December 1514, Charles came of age on
6 January 1515 before the estates at Brussels. Charles’s majority was
produced by a court intrigue and the readiness of the provinces to pay
for the privilege of being ruled by a native prince.

The accession of Charles ushered in a Burgundian restoration. Jean
le Sauvage was immediately created chancelier de Bourgogne, and proved
to be the last occupant of the office, for on his death in June 1518 he was
succeeded by Gattinara as Charles’s personal chancellor, while the
audiencier took charge of legal business in the Netherlands for which
the chancellor had previously been responsible. But during his term of
office, Le Sauvage exercised a supervision over all branches of government,
as Nicolas Rolin had done in the fifteenth century. Again in conformity
with Burgundian tradition, government was identified with the household.

252

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, 1477-152I

This arrangement suited Chievres and Le Sauvage, for the first as premier
chambellan was head of the household department, which stood in closest
relations to Charles, and the second as chancellor controlled the secretaries.
The council was composed of lords and lawyers drawn from the Low
Countries and Franche-Comte, with the exception of the Pfalzgraf, who
was Maximilian’s spokesman, and Gattinara, who was Margaret’s.
Although individual councillors, like Henry of Nassau, wielded great influ-
ence, on account of their wealth their political importance depended more
on their position in the household. The highest decisions rested with
Chievres, Le Sauvage and Adrian of Utrecht, and with the two former
after the last was sent on his invidious mission to Spain at the end of 1515.

Charles entered his lands on terms generally similar to the inaugurations
of his father; but the stability of the regime in the intervening years turned
Charles’s entries into festive events rather than bargains about local
liberties. In April 1 5 1 5 he made additions to his Blijde lnkomst in Brabant,
which, though expelling the gypsies, increased the personal freedom of
his other subjects in the duchy. But he was not prepared to brook even
the whisper of an extorted concession; and when after his reception at
Ghent rumours spread that he had abrogated the Peace of Cadzand,
Charles rebuked the town for its lenient treatment of the rumour-mongers
and republished the peace in April 1515. The incident was significant of
an unrest within the towns that became more marked as Charles’s reign
progressed, though already in 1514 there had been at Zierikerzee a riot
against the magistrates. Discontent among the poor was growing, which
at Brussels (1532) and Ghent (1539) culminated in sedition against the
central government which backed the municipal ruling classes.

The reversal of Margaret of Austria’s policy toward France was so
striking as to create an exaggerated impression of the cleavage between
Chievres and her. Louis XII died on 1 January 1515, and the coincidence
that his successor Francis I and Charles began to reign in the same month
necessitated a fresh start. It is easy to condemn Chievres in 1515 for
surrender to France, but the situation in Liege, Guelders and Friesland
invited French intervention, which, having delayed the moral and political
development of a state in the Netherlands, threatened to postpone in-
definitely their unification.

Theembassy which Henry of Nassau led to Paris did homage in Charles’s
name for Flanders and Artois, attempting, though unsuccessfully, to do
homage for Burgundy also. On 24 March 1515 the Treaty of Paris was
made. Charles was to marry Renee daughter of Louis XII, but she was
to be dowered with the inaccessible fief of Berry, and Henry of Nassau
was to marry the heiress of Orange-Chalon, a house which for a century
had steered between France and Burgundy. This feudal marriage, unlike
most of the treaty, was fulfilled. An alliance of friendship was struck
between Francis and Charles, who nevertheless received no protection

19 253 MCMHl

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

against the duke of Guelders and the bishop of Liege, save in so far as
the contracting parties undertook not to help each other’s foes.

The treaty, which like every treaty with France was rapturously received,
left the door open for an understanding with England, and following
the analogy of 1496 and 1508 a settlement with England quickly succeeded
one with France. In diplomacy the three Powers managed to keep pace
with one another over the next few years. A political and trade agreement
was concluded with England in January 1516; and when the Treaty of
Noyon (13 August 1516) saved amity with France at the price of letting
Francis substitute for Renee his own daughter less than a year old as a
bride for Charles, negotiations for another treaty with England were
begun within the month. At the very end of 1516 Maximilian paid what
was to be his last visit to the Netherlands; but instead of removing
Chievres and Le Sauvage, as he had given Henry VIII to expect, the
emperor ratified the Treaty of Noyon. The diplomatic activity of these
years can only be understood against the background of Charles’s
approaching succession in Spain. On 23 January 1516 Ferdinand of
Aragon died, bequeathing Aragon to Charles, whom he also named as
regent in the other Spanish kingdoms. In March 1516 Charles was
proclaimed king at Brussels.

The rich considered Spain a field of Burgundian expansion; and the
Spaniards, whose numbers in the Low Countries had been growing, were
well received compared with Maximilian’s countrymen. Whereas the
Golden Fleece blocked the emperor’s attempt to convert it into an
Austro-Habsburg order, the chapter of Michaelmas 1516 approved its
extension to Spain, reserving ten stalls for Spaniards to be filled when its
sovereign Charles visited his new realm.

Although conditions within the peninsula cried out for his presence,
Charles delayed sailing for Spain until September 1517. It may be thought
that Chievres wanted to keep him a purely Burgundian prince for as long
as possible; and in 1517 Henry VIII’s ambassadors complained that
Charles’s councillors treated him more like a duke of Brabant than a king.
On the other hand, Charles’s government embarked early in 1515 on
financial reforms that required time, besides having its attention fully
engaged in Guelders, Utrecht and Friesland. The impatience of Philip in
1506 to get to Spain even at the sacrifice of security was not repeated.

In 1514 a more detailed survey ( Informatie ) than that of 1494 showed
Holland to be wealthier and more populous than twenty years before;
but when in 1515 a fresh tax assessment was made such opposition was
aroused that by 1518 it had to be replaced. In Flanders any revision of
taxation had to contend with an assessment more than a century out of
date, which threatened to become an immutable quota. The reintroduction
of amortisation (mortmain) on the clergy was in itself a measure sufficient
to test the strength of the central power.

254

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-152I

The ‘Transport’ of Flanders was a subsidy-book, which showed how
much the Members, the smaller towns and the rural areas, paid whenever
the county as a whole paid an aide. But the ‘Transport’ had not been
revised since 1408, and changes in wealth rendered its modernisation
urgent if it was to be made an instrument of taxation for a monarchic
state. A commission for its revision was appointed in May 1515, whose
report was only completed in October 1517.

The 1515 ‘Transport’ brought in rather more than that of 1408; but
whereas the towns had produced over 50 per cent of the whole, their
share in 1515 sank to 44 per cent. The increase in the quota of the smaller
towns and of the countryside was too general to be explicable otherwise
than by a shift in industry. Bruges, which in 1408 contributed 15-7 per cent,
made up only 14-4 per cent of the whole in 1515; but Grammont and
Alost were raised from 7-4 per cent in 1408 to 8-6 per cent. Even more
striking was the advance in the proportion of tax allotted to country
districts around Ypres, Fumes and Courtrai, where rural cloth and linen
industries were established.

The amortisation of clerical property was a step in the policy pursued
throughout Charles’s reign of bringing under state control ecclesiastical
provisions, wealth and jurisdiction. In theory the dukes of Burgundy
fixed their charge for amortising clerical property from liability to the
aide at three times the annual value of such property; but until 1474 their
mortmain ordinances, which varied from one territory to another, were
not strictly enforced, and after 1477 few ecclesiastics complied with the
law. In April 1515 an addition to the Blijde Inkomst forbade clergy
outside Brabant from acquiring property inside the duchy without licence;
but in May 1515 a census was ordered of all property acquired by the
Church in Flanders during the last forty years, in other words since the
mortmain ordinance of Charles the Bold (10 July 1474). This, and the
letters sent in December 1515 to the prince’s lieutenants in various pro-
vinces for the enforcement of amortisation, provoked opposition not only
from the clergy, but from burghers who controlled pious foundations. The
efforts of its opponents to appeal to Rome were treated by the government
as tantamount to treason; but the standing of Charles with Leo X denied
them much support from that quarter, and an edict of 19 October 1520
proceeded a stage further by forbidding within Brabant the conveyance
of property to ecclesiastics save under licence.

His credit at Rome also enabled Charles to recover control over
Utrecht in the Burgundian tradition of treating territorial bishoprics as
appanages for the bastards of the dynasty. In 1516 bishop Frederick of
Baden, whose neutral attitude toward the duke of Guelders was a matter
of concern at Brussels, was induced to resign in favour of the admiral,
the bastard Philip of Burgundy, who became bishop of Utrecht in March
1517. In Rome the affair was conducted at the highest level, to which

255 19-a

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

regional parties, such as the estates of Utrecht or even the duke of Guelders,
could not aspire. Pending the secularisation of the temporalities of
Utrecht after his death in 1524, Philip could be relied upon to pay regard
to the interests of the dynasty in the dangerous situation on the north-
eastern side of the Netherlands.

In May 1515 George of Saxony sold to Charles his rights over Friesland
for a fraction of the amount in respect of which Philip le Beau had pledged
them to his father, Albert of Saxony. The sons of Albert and their com-
petitor, Edzard Cirksena, count of East Friesland, failed to erect a
territorial lordship over Friesland, because neither side could come to
terms with Groningen. This town, on which all Friesland was said to
depend, if not powerful enough to subjugate the province, could prevent
any one else doing so except on terms acceptable to Groningen. Charles of
Egmond readily agreed to its terms, and in October 1514 Groningen
accepted him and soon after put itself under the protection of France.
Charles of Habsburg and Charles of Egmond were brought into a direct
clash for yet another land.

True to the tradition of playing the junior IJsselstein branch against
the senior line of Guelders, Floris van Egmond, who succeeded his uncle
as stadhouder of Holland in 1515, was appointed stadhouder also in
Friesland for Charles of Habsburg. The fortunes of war fluctuated in
Friesland through 1516 and 1517; but in the summer of 1517 a Frisian
fleet swept the shipping of Holland from the Zuider Zee, and a horde of
mercenaries landed in the service of Guelders at Medemblik, ravaging
Holland southwards to Asperen. The estates had agreed in the autumn
of 1516 to finance four bandes d'ordonnance ; but inadequate financial
and military preparation rendered them of little immediate service. The
return to the military reforms of Charles the Bold was, however, a
wholesome break with the dependence on mercenaries for which Maxi-
milian was mainly responsible; and the revived bandes d'ordonnance
mopped up the plundering bands of mercenaries in the lower Rhine
during Charles’s absence in Spain, and enabled him on his return in
1521 to conquer Tournai, which Henry VIII retroceded to Francis I in
February 1519. For the time the duke of Guelders, who was running
short of money, was more effectively contained by a treaty concluded at
Ghent in June 1517 whereby Edzard Cirksena, count of East Friesland,
became the client of the Habsburgs.

The estates held at Ghent in June-July 1517 showed what a strong
position Charles had attained before he sailed to Spain from Flushing on
8 September 1517. The Pensioner of Ghent, whose predecessors were
spokesmen of anti-monarchic opinion, now led the protests of devotion;
and, amidst tears at his departure, the estates pressed on him an aide.
In return political plans for the government during his absence were
communicated to them. The council formed on 23 July 1517 preserved

256

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE BURGUNDIAN NETHERLANDS, I477-I521

the nominal headship of the emperor. To Margaret of Austria was ac-
corded ceremonial pre-eminence, but no specific authority over the council.
In reality, however, she was freer than in 1507 or even after 1509, for, by
declining to appoint a lieutenant, Charles left her a clear field, and the
stamp for printing his name on official papers was entrusted to Margaret’s
keeping. Not until 1 and 16 July 1519, shortly after Charles’s elevation
to the empire, did he confer on her the powers of a regent.

During Charles’s absence, Margaret achieved a promising (though
impermanent) solution of relations with Liege. Two distinct problems
existed, the status of the Pays de Liege within the Netherlands and the
position of the bishop firard de la Marck and his family between the
Habsburg and Valois Powers. Since 1506 Erard had revealed himself as
both an adroit diplomat and an able ruler, without whom Liege would
scarcely have survived as a prince-bishopric. Charles’s good standing at
Rome facilitated his curtailment of the bishop’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction
in Brabant (July 1515), but in Girolamo Aleandro the bishop had a skilful
intermediary with the Holy See ; so that, on Charles’s return from Spain
in 1520, Aleandro and eventually Erard recovered a wide jurisdiction over
the Low Countries for the repression of heresy. The estates of the Pays de
Liege suspected any move toward closer ties with the rest of the Nether-
lands, clinging to neutrality as the guarantee of their regional independence.
Already in January 1517 Charles, attempting to drive a wedge between
the Litgeois and their bishop, summoned them to clarify their position as
between Francis I and himself; but for a time it was easier for Habs-
burg to come to terms with La Marck, a deal between a major and a
minor family.

Two treaties, one public, the other private, were agreed to at St Trond
on 27 April 1518; the former was subject to ratification by the estates of
Liege, the latter concerned the relations of Habsburg and La Marck. At
the price of a pension and by dangling before his eyes preferment within
Charles’s patronage, Erard was induced to undertake not to dispose of
his bishopric to any successor other than his nephew, and to pledge the
La Marck family to serve Charles envers et contre tous. The estates of
Liege were only brought to accept the public treaty on 14 November 1518,
which although it did something to clear up confusions over jurisdiction
to the advancement of commerce between Brabant and Liege, violated
their ideas of neutrality by providing for military aid to the Brussels
government. The La Marck family disregarded the secret treaty in 1521
when Charles fought his first campaign against Francis I ; and subsequent
trends delayed the incorporation of Liege into the Netherlands until the
nineteenth century.

The death of Maximilian (12 January 1519) precipitated an imperial
election, the Netherlands constituting the surety on which the Fuggers
bought the Empire from the electors for Charles on 28 June 1519. The

257

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

provinces, indifferent to the election of Max in i486, were emotionally
stirred at the elevation of his grandson in 1519, and the estates of Brabant
anticipated with an aide the costs of his coronation.

Charles disembarked from Spain on 1 June 1520 at Flushing; and on
his way to be crowned at Aachen told the estates that ‘ son cceur avait
toujours ete par dega'. His will of 1522 is that of a Burgundian, directing
that if Dijon was not reconquered at his death, he should be buried beside
his grandmother in Bruges ; in 1 524 he paid 1 24 livres to the son of Georges
Chastellain for a complete manuscript of his father’s chronicle of Valois
dukes. The provinces also beheld in him the bond of their unity ; and when
the question arose of a Habsburg family partition to provide lands for
Charles’s brother Ferdinand, public opinion, voiced by the estates of
Brabant, resisted any dismemberment of the Low Countries, and helped
to bring about Ferdinand’s renunciation of claims upon them in return
for his obtaining the Austrian lands.

258

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER IX

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST:
DIPLOMACY AND WAR

at the end of the fifteenth century the normal state among Christians
ZA was assumed to be peace, tempered by a readiness to repel the
1 V infidel. In practice nothing was more likely than war among
Christians and, in order to leave them free to pursue it, overtures of peace
to the Turk.

Chivalric writers still taught that war could be glorious, the scientific
approach of Italian theorists lost sight of its horrors in deep interest, and
both points of view admired the successful captain — one for his bravery,
his prouesse, the other for the mark on events of his genius and energy,
his virtu. The first thought war legitimate because it was noble, the other
because force was an obvious and legitimate branch of negotiation.

The Church also, by supporting the institutions of chivalry and the
knightly orders, had blessed weapons that were not always to be used
against the oppressor or the infidel, and by admitting that it was permis-
sible to wage a just war, she had in effect sanctioned all wars. The criteria
of a just war, it was generally agreed, were that it should only be waged
on the authority of a superior, for a just cause and with righteous intent,
and the satisfaction of these conditions was not hard save to the most
recalcitrant conscience. The Church, too, needed war to support her
authority and punish those who defied it. And she was partly responsible
for the view that in great causes war was a divine judgment, an extension
of the judicial duel, where two armies instead of two rival champions
fought to decide who was in the right. The condemnation of war was
hampered, moreover, by the difficulty of distinguishing it from feud, which
was tacitly admitted to represent a legitimate way of obtaining justice,
as between either individual corporations, or countries. And the same
lawyers who treated war and reprisal as one and the same thing added
the theological defence that war was God’s means of resolving discord
into peace and harmony. Johannes de Legnano, who wrote in 1360 the
first treatise to deal exclusively with the legal aspects of war, the Tractatus
de Bello , de Represaliis et de Duello, stressed the naturalness of war, the
necessary lance for humanity’s imposthumes. The notion that the Prince
of Peace blessed arms that were truly borne persisted through the in-
creasingly scientific warfare of the early sixteenth century and caused
guns to be named after the apostles, swords and halberds to be engraved
with scenes from the passion and generals to kiss the earth before
launching an attack in the name of their patron saints. In the best cause

259

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

of all, war against the invading infidel, the armies and navies of countries
which in this period were directly threatened by the Turks, Venice,
Albania, Hungary, Wallachia and Moldavia, were continuously in action
or at best in partial mobilisation during snatches of uneasy peace, and it
was only in 1502 that the armies of Spain finally expelled the Moors from
Granada. The spectacle of so much legitimate war blunted the sense of
horror for war as a whole.

Every country, besides, had been shaped geographically by war and
socially in part for war; the momentum did not easily run down. The
nobility had been educated for war and in peace was at a loss. Land was
no longer so profitable and the tourney was no adequate compensation
for actual combat. For financial and emotional reasons the knight longed
for war and foreign adventure, and the wars of Italy were encouraged and
prolonged by a nobility whose functions at court had been taken over by
professional administrators and whose estates were often incapable of
supporting a large family. For the non-mercantile classes war offered the
main chance of getting rich quickly, by loot and ransom. And once war
had started, the same motives led to its continuing. ‘What shall we
do, ’ the French Marshal Monluc imagined a captain asking, ‘ What shall
we do if we do not lay up money, and clip the soldiers’ pay? When war
is at an end, we must go to the hospital, for neither the king nor anyone
else will regard us, and we are poor of ourselves. ’ l

In Spain the constant warfare against the Moors, the barren nature of
much of the country and the fact that most trade and industry were in
non-Christian hands, left a gentle class even more dependent on military
adventure than the French, and the Spaniards were looked upon by
contemporaries as a warlike people who thought honour reposed largely
in the pursuit of arms. Similarly in Germany, especially in the south and
west where industry and trade were ceasing to produce enough to cover
imports of foodstuffs for a rapidly growing population, there were
numerous nobles from small patrimonies, ridiculed in Italy for their
exclusively military education, who were eager for war. Switzerland,
who possessed the finest troops available and whose public gatherings
were mainly concerned with drills and parades, depended on war to
provide a market for almost her sole export — infantrymen.

No appeal to preserve the status quo during the second half of the
fifteenth century would have been listened to, or have meant very much
to countries like France and the Spanish kingdoms, for instance, whose
frontiers were liable to wide fluctuations according to the result of a
battle or siege or the falling in of a fief, or to those eastern countries
whose boundaries were constantly shifting before the varying pressures
of the Turkish advance. The period had seen the collapse of the semi-

1 The Commentaries of Messire Btaize de Montluc, trans. Charles Cotton (London, 1674),

p.4.

260

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

independent empire of Charles of Burgundy, which stretched from the
North Sea to the latitude of Lake Leman, Roussillon and Cerdagne pass
to Spain, and the effective power of France advanced to the Mediterranean.
In a Europe intricately meshed with feudal obligations and the counter-
claims arising from centuries of dynastic marriages, the status quo was
always liable to be altered by a fortunate demise or the disinterment of an
ancient claim now judged ripe for enforcing. Nationalities were still
vague, land was valued for the pleasures and profits of possession, not
for the language spoken on it. Nations were not to be satisfied even with
natural frontiers when such a conception did not yet exist.

A monarch’s hunger for land, which he shared with other landowners,
did not depend on the consent of his country before it could be gratified.
‘Everyone knows’, wrote Honore Bonet at the end of the fourteenth
century, ‘that in the matter of deciding on war, of declaring it, or of
undertaking it, poor men are not concerned at all.’ 1 It was no less true
a hundred years later, when royal hands had been still further strengthened
by the grant of permanent taxes to meet grave emergencies. Foreign
policy depended in no country on the estates, and where there was a really
strong executive, as in France, they counted for little even where taxes
were concerned; at no point was the course of the Italian wars seriously
affected by the action of the belligerents’ assemblies. Armies, too, were
but a small fraction of the population and were composed largely of men
either whose interests were identical with the ruler’s, or who were hired
by him. No case had to be laid before a country to woo it to arms, and
as increasing reliance was placed in professional soldiery the bulk of the
population was ignored. War was waged at the discretion of the king.

No economic compulsion drove the Powers into the Italian wars. Their
initiator, France, was self-supporting. Her wine and grain made her
independent of imported foodstuffs, nor was she dependent on imported
raw materials, though she bought some metal for cannon. Her exports,
wine, salt and grain, found ready markets and required no forcing. Her
peasantry was so prosperous that they had no wish to leave their land and
go soldiering. War for France was a luxury. Similarly the intervention
of Spain was only incidentally to guard Sicily and the ships that brought
grain to the Catholic kings. Maximilian did not join the Holy League of
1495 because his revenues were threatened by French successes. Henry
VIII was not forced to join the Holy League of 151 1 and invade Guienne
to protect English commercial interests: like Charles, he was making a
speculative grasp at certain luxuries. More imagined himself as inter-
vening in the Council of the king of France, urging them ‘to turn over
the leaf, and learn a new lesson, saying that my counsell is not to meddle
with Italy but to tarry still at home, and that the kingdom of France alone
is almost greater than that it may well be governed of one man, so that
1 L'Arbre des Batailles, ed. G. W. Coopland (Liverpool U.P., 1949), question 48.

261

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

the king should not need to study how to get more’. But this is a passage
from Utopia.

The Powers of the west were ready to expand. England and France had
recovered from the Hundred Years War, though the subsequent civil war
left the former less immediately ready for an aggressive foreign policy
than France, where the Crown had been strengthened by the acquisition
of Guienne (1453), Burgundy (1477), Provence (1481), and Brittany (1491).
By 1492 Spain was freed from internal commitments. And the tendency
to expand was not delayed by any concept of national unification nor
directed by one of natural frontiers. States looked beyond their borders
as soon as the minimum internal order needed to support a war economy
was gained. And no desire to make economic and national frontiers
coincide determined the direction conquest should take, no desire to
reach the natural lines of a mountain range or a river, nor to make frontiers
correspond to language or custom. The obvious route for French expan-
sion was north-east, across the plain to the Netherlands, to Brussels and
Antwerp, so easily reached from Paris, and so rich. Instead, Charles VIII
drove south, over the Alps and down the thin Italian peninsula to Naples,
rich only in grain which France did not need, and where communications
could only be ensured by a sea power she did not possess. Both the
economic and political interests of the greater part of Spain lay more to
the west in Portugal and the New World than in the Mediterranean, in
spite of Aragonese expansion there, but even before there was any dynastic
need to link Spain with Austria, she committed herself to being involved
for three centuries in Italy. It is significant that the Nation States which
have given their name to a popular view of this period fought their wars
with the aid of foreign mercenaries, and that a queen of France proposed
in 1501 to hand over the great duchies of Brittany and Burgundy in
return for the betrothal of Charles of Habsburg to her daughter. National
feeling and a national foreign policy were the consequence and not the
cause of an age of dynastic wars. Again, treaties were not insuperable
barriers to aggression. They were not broken lightly, it is true, for they
were solemnised with the utmost gravity, and a breach of their letter
involved the grave spiritual crime of perjury and brought dishonour as
well as the more impersonal penalties of excommunication and interdict.
It was necessary to find some legal flaw in the wording, or in the intention,
of a treaty. It was necessary to prepare men’s minds for the breach by
an assiduous propaganda, using pulpit, university, street pageant, broad-
sheet, medal and song. Such a breach was made easier by uncertainty as
to whether the successors to the original signatories of a treaty were
themselves bound to it. More, again, put the matter clearly.

The more and holier ceremonies the league is built up with, the sooner it is broken by
some cavillation found in the words, which many times of purpose be so craftily
put in, and placed, that the bands can never be so sure nor so strong, but they

262

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

will find some hole open to creep out at The which crafty dealing ... if they should

know it to be practised among private men in their bargains and contracts, they
would incontinent cry out at it with an open mouth, and a sour countenance, as an
offense most detestable, and worthy to be punished with a shameful death.

This implication of hypocrisy must not be taken too literally, however.
Treaties could be broken by means of legal reinterpretation and papal
approval, with no sense that personal convenience had been obtained
illegitimately.

Apart from a minimum of internal stability, the prerequisites of war
were money— of which the Powers, apart from the empire, had enough —
and troops. Here there was a difficulty. The victories of the Swiss over
the heavy Burgundian cavalry at Grandson and Morat (1476) had estab-
lished heavy infantry as the decisive tactical factor in warfare. But this
was true only of men trained on the Swiss model. Until the heavy infantry
of Germany and Spain copied their tactics early in the sixteenth century,
the Swiss monopoly was unchallenged. And it was consciously exploited.
The free movement of mercenaries was checked : they were too valuable
an export to be left unregulated by the State. And Switzerland was not
simply a reservoir of troops, but a country with political and commercial
aspirations of its own. Thus Louis XII lost Bellinzona to them in 1503
because he would not listen to their request for commercial liberties in
the Milanese. His continued deafness to their demands finally cost him
their alliance in 1509, and their troops came to be at the disposal of his
enemies. The Confederation, in fact, in spite of its peculiar nature, and
the looseness of the ties binding the cantons, had to be treated as an ally,
not a contractor. This is not to say that rejection by the diet was final.
Its own contracts were filled by its choice of the best troops, but many
were left who could be hired, or, more accurately, bribed, independently.
Thus in 1499, when Lodovico Sforza had been supplied officially with
10,000 troops to fight the French, Louis unofficially obtained 20,000 to
fight Lodovico. On the whole, no Power had to give up its plans for war
owing to the attitude of one of the ad hoc diets which regulated the military
policy of the Confederation.

Confronting the Powers thus ready for war and able to wage it, there
was the standing temptation of Italy, rich, divided, still with the glamour
of the capital of the present spiritual and of the ancient secular world,
linked already by feudal and family ties with Spain, the Empire and France.

To deal with these tensions, the latent impetus to war, the old inter-
national organs of arbitration were powerless. The Empire, it is true, had
not lost all the prestige its propagandists had won for it. It was the
highest secular dignity, the Emperor alone could create kings, he alone
was addressed as Majesty. Charles VIII thirsted for an imperial title,
and entered Naples holding the orb of the emperors of the east, accom-
panied by rumours of his coveting that of the west. But the Emperor was

263

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

no longer invoked as an arbiter between nations. His decisions had
seemed increasingly shaped to stress his own authority.

It was the same with the Papacy. Conservative men still looked to it
to keep the secular rulers from one another’s throats. ‘It is the proper
function of the Roman Pontiff, of the Cardinals, of Bishops, and of
Abbots’, wrote Erasmus in 1514, ‘to compose the quarrels of Christian
princes.’ But though its universal sovereignty was not altogether con-
tested, though Peter’s Pence were still widely paid, though papal legates
had acted frequently as mediators in the last phase of the Hundred Years
War, its role as international arbiter was a declining one. Treaties might
still be signed with an oath, inviting spiritual penalties, and the pope alone
could dispense from their terms; but increasingly clauses were inserted
that bound the parties not to apply for dispensation, or emphasised that
the pope was acting not ex officio but as a private person. The control
of the Papacy over warfare was still more definitely at an end. The pro-
hibition of the second Lateran Council of 1139 against making slaves of
Christian prisoners, confirming the Truces of God and forbidding trade
in war materials with the infidel — all these measures were dead. Outside
Italy papal censures were ignored though they troubled many individual
consciences. The special nature of the spiritual power no longer seriously
affected either preparations for war or the way in which it was waged.

The crucial test of the pope’s influence over the warlike states was
when he spoke as the head of Christendom in calling for unity against
the Turk. The desirability of this unity was repeatedly granted by the
Powers. ‘ It is the primary duty of Christian Powers to propagate the faith
of Christ and to exterminate the enemies of the Christian name’ urged
the Treaty of London (1518) between Francis I and Henry VIII, and
Francis, forced by lack of sea power to ally with the Turk in 1535, apo-
logised for this action to the pope. The danger, moreover, was clear enough.
In 1456 the Turks had besieged Belgrade, in 1480 occupied Otranto, in
1521 they invaded Hungary and took Belgrade by storm. The countries
who were most nearly threatened begged loudly for help. In 1499 and
again in 1517 the Papacy called a crusade. Taxes were levied, consciences
were stirred. When Ferdinand and Louis XII met at Savona in 1507 it
was believed that it was to discuss the danger from the Turks. What in
fact they were discussing was the partition of Italy. And on the fall of
Aleppo, two years before the Treaty of London, Henry VIII spoke his
mind to the Venetian ambassador who had begged his aid.

Domine Orator! You are sage, and of your prudence may comprehend that no
general expedition against the Turks will ever be effected so long as such treachery
prevails amongst the Christian powers, that their sole thought is to destroy one
another. 1

1 Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII. Despatches written by the Venetian Ambassador,
Sebastian Giustinian, ed. R. Brown (London, 1854), vol. 11, p. 57.

264

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

And alongside cries for unity against the Turks active political traffic
with the Turk continued on the part of Powers who feared them, or wished
their support as allies against their fellow Christians — an example that
had been already set by the rulers of the Morea. From 1490 to 1494 the
Papacy received an annual payment from the Sultan Bayezid for keeping
Jem, his brother and potential rival, a prisoner. This action of the pope’s
enabled the Turk to take a firmer line in his dealings with Christians in
the Balkans, and with Venice. The sultan’s tolerance of western merchants
— by 1507 there were the agents of some sixty or more Florentine firms in
Constantinople — made it difficult for the Italian states to look on him
with proper horror. He was instead involved as an ally, Milan, Ferrara,
Mantua and Florence combining in 1497 to bribe the Turks to help them
in an attack on Venice. Though there was still a sentiment of the unity
of Christendom as against the Turk, it is not surprising that the Papacy
was unable to use it to turn the Powers from their wars of personal gain.

The common preoccupation was not with the Turk but with Italy,
and it led to deepened political rivalry, not to unity, but though concen-
tration for a long period on a common problem helped to define national
antagonisms, at the same time it forced states to take more notice of one
another ; the tendency to expand led to increasing diplomatic exchanges,
the common interest in Italy led to increased mutual watchfulness. A virtue
of historians today is that they stress continuity; a foible, that they are
tempted to over-stress it. In the history of diplomacy a definite change
occurs in this period. The more swiftly armies could be mobilised, the
better organised had the information services of the threatened states to
be; as foreign policy became more complicated, more comprehensive,
more subject to sudden change, each country, especially the weak,
needed to be kept in touch with the intentions of the others. This could
only be done by keeping permanent representatives at their courts. The
growth of permanent embassies was also fostered by the preference for
settling differences through diplomatic channels rather than by international
arbitration; the Powers were more liable to get their own way. Besides,
there was flattery implied in the presence of an ambassador as it so often
reflected the fear of the weak for the strong. As the tempo of inter-
national relations quickened, the total time spent in negotiation grew.
New alignments called for fevered diplomatic activity. Though there
were a few lasting themes — English use of the Flemish alliance to counter
French use of Scotland ; Spain’s reliance on England when plotting against
France; English dependence on the Empire when threatened by France;
Maximilian’s longing for the Veneto — it was largely a period of flux.
An alliance did not mean security, or that negotiations with other Powers
could safely be dropped, as Henry VIII found in 1514 and 1517, when his
allies were secretly preparing to change sides. There was urgent need for
constant bargaining, information and vigilance.

265

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The old casual diplomacy, in fact, no longer sufficed. The embassies
which previously had accompanied the gift of a knightly Order, of the
rose d'or or the epee de Noel, or had handled a marriage contract, a
declaration of war or a truce, had been appointed for the occasion only
and, on its completion, had returned and dispersed. There had been
little continuity in diplomatic relations. Monarchs tried to see that
their interests abroad were cared for by ‘retaining’ prominent officials at
foreign courts by bribes. Louis XI paid such fees to the Chancellor of
England as well as to the Master of the Rolls and the High Chamberlain,
and was said to be more powerful in Germany than Maximilian himself.
But such pensioners were only faithful when it suited them. Nor was it
co mm on for monarchs to be their own diplomats. Though interviews
between sovereigns were often planned, they were seldom carried out.
The assassination of John the Fearless of Burgundy on the bridge of
Montereau in 1419 had provided a dismal precedent. When Louis XI met
Edward IV in 1475 a wooden lattice was placed across a bridge of boats
over the Somme, as close-set as the bars of a lion’s cage, and through
these the two kings embraced. The suspicion and precaution involved by
these meetings robbed them of intimacy and frankness, and when meetings
were arranged, as between Ferdinand and Louis XII at Savona in 1507,
and Henry VIII and Francis I in 1520, they merely complemented the
labours of standing diplomats and were no substitute for them.

For weak states to have permanent representatives abroad was the
condition of their retaining alliances in which they were the dispensable
partners. Venice owed her inclusion in treaties that could well have done
without her to the pertinacious nursing of her interests by her ambassadors.
Lodovico Sforza owed much to the skill of his permanent ambassador in
France, the count of Belgioioso, who won round several of Charles’s
entourage to the Italian expedition. So urgent was the states’ desire to
be represented at a potentially dangerous court that Louis XII was nearly
stifled by their competing importunities; all wished to see him at least
once a day. They went hunting with him, feasted with him, in his absence
paid court to his queen and his ministers ; they even bribed his servants
to report what he said while eating and drinking or going to bed. Or an
exchange of ambassadors might serve to cement an alliance, and further
understanding, between two powerful but suspicious rulers, especially if
their agreement, like that between Henry VIII and Charles V in 1520, was
a secret one.

One of the objects of standing diplomacy was to provide a news service
to guide governments in determining their foreign policy. A preparation
had been made for this in the early days of occasional diplomacy when
Venice, by a decree of 1288, required her ambassadors to submit a report
on all things interesting to the State within fifteen days of their return.
From the mid-thirteenth century, too, she had had, in her commercial

266

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

agents in the Levant, an example of the usefulness of regular reports.
The bailo at Constantinople, the consul of Alexandria and the vice-
consuls at Chios, Tunis and Naples, insensibly came to be concerned with
politics as well as with trade and the legal position of Venetians abroad ;
they were expected to send regular political information whether it
directly concerned the state of the market or not.

The tension which led to the proliferation of purely diplomatic standing
representatives did not come till the second half of the fifteenth century,
but there were some isolated examples which showed an appreciation of
the virtues of continuous personal contact between states. Luigi Gonzaga
of Mantua had a resident agent with the Emperor Lewis before 1341.
In 1375 Milan and Mantua exchanged ambassadors to further their
co-operation against the Scaligers of Verona. For more than seven years
Filippo Maria Visconti kept a representative at the court of the king of
the Romans, and for most of this period Sigismund was represented in
Milan. Here too, the aim was to consolidate and keep alert an alliance.

The same aim prompted Francesco Sforza, aspirant to the duchy of
Milan, to send his secretary Nicodemo da Pontremoli in 1446 to reside at
Florence with his ally Cosimo de’ Medici. He took part in negotiating the
league of Milan, Florence and France, which, after considerable fighting,
secured Sforza from Venice by the Peace of Lodi in 1454. This peace was
followed by a period of some forty years in which the alignment of the
five principal Italian states, Naples, the Papacy, Venice, Florence and
Milan, was so nicely adjusted, and the response to any hint of expansion
so immediate and regular (Florence, Naples, Milan checking Venice)
that it has been seen as exemplifying the principle of balance in foreign
policy — a phrase already used before the end of the century. The watchful-
ness and co-operation this required led to a rapid extension of standing
diplomacy. By 1458 each of the four states had representatives at each
other’s courts. This development was confirmed by the position of Rome.
There were precedents for retaining agents at the curia, for the impor-
tance of the Papacy as an ally, and the standing of the city as a news
exchange, drew increasing numbers of ambassadors. From the dispatch
of Marcolino Barbavara from Milan in 1445 numbers grew so fast that
Pius II tried vainly to reduce them by threatening to degrade any who
stayed longer than six months to the status of proctor, with a consequent
loss of privileges. And as the transalpine states grew in power, and as
they forced themselves increasingly on the notice of the Italian states, the
practice of standing diplomacy spread to the north. When the shadow
of aggression began to glide over Italy as France rose to her full height
of warlike preparation, the states of Italy tried to repel or guide this
menace by sending agents to reside there. From 1463 to 1475 there was
a Milanese ambassador in France. Venice was represented in Burgundy
from 1471 and, on the collapse of Burgundy, in France from 1485. When

267

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

hostilities were near, or had actually begun, the process grew still further.
Even the Papacy weakened, and sent two agents in 1495 to reside at
Maximilian’s court. Venice sent representatives to Spain and the Empire
in 1495 and to England in 1496. Milan had standing agents in Spain from
1490, in England from about the same time, with Maximilian from 1494,
and Belgioioso was with Charles VIII from 1493. Naples sent ambas-
sadors to England in 1490, to Spain and the emperor in 1494. The
practice extended still further as, forced into close and continual contact
by their common preoccupation with Italy, the northern Powers came to
maintain standing ambassadors at one another’s courts. From 1495
Spain kept a representative in London. Louis XII was not only represen-
ted at Rome and Venice, but with the archduke, with Margaret of Austria
and in Spain. By 1504 the attitude of the Papacy had changed from criti-
cism to acceptance, and Julius II’s master of ceremonies issued an order
of precedence of Christian kings and dukes and their representatives.

This does not mean that by 1 504, or even a generation later, standing
diplomacy was the rule. Only the countries interested in Italy used it
regularly. Scotland, Portugal, Poland, Scandinavia, Hungary and the
German princes relied on the old occasional diplomacy, and even among
the others the dispatch of a resident ambassador did not mean that the
post would be maintained once it ceased to be profitable. The old reliance
on spies had, after all been fairly effective. Henry VII was famous for
the precision of his continental information, and this nearly all came
from unofficial agents. A man like Thomas Spinelly, a Florentine in the
pay of the English Crown from 1509, was not only a most valuable source
of news, thanks to his access to information from the great merchant news
centres, Antwerp, Bruges and Lyons, but could be used to handle matters
that required secrecy. To bring these agents into the open, and to give
them the title of ambassador, was not necessarily to increase their usefulness.
But agents were eager to gain the prestige of official rank, and as the
pressure of foreign relations increased, it became even more necessary to
add to the class of secret agents men who were more responsible, and who
could be used for open negotiation. Even France, who had previously
been content with fairly steady representation at Rome, placed others at
Venice from 1517, in Switzerland and Portugal from 1522, England from
1525 and the Empire from 1526. Special embassies were still used in
conjunction with a permanent diplomacy. The resident ambassadors were
concerned largely with investigation and report; neither their rank, as a
rule, nor their credentials qualified them to negotiate matters of special
importance. To deal with these, an ambassador of more standing was
sent, and the resident remained in a subordinate position until he had
gone.

Such ambassadors still travelled opulently on occasion, with an elaborate
train comprising ecclesiastics, guards of honour, and a numerous secre-

268

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

tariat of lawyers and scribes. The resident, though certain formalities were
observed in the presentation of his credentials, lived humbly, sometimes
with a colleague of equal or secretarial status, but often alone. Less
officially than either of these classes of ambassador, important persons
still undertook diplomatic missions, as did Beatrice d’Este, wife of
Lodovico Sforza, when she went to Venice in 1493 to protest Milan’s
friendship. Nor was the herald without a place in the new diplomacy. To-
gether with the roi d'armes he was especially persona grata at suspicious or
hostile courts who accepted him for the chivalric prestige and the traditional
immunity of his office. Heralds were not simply used as negotiators
between armies in the field as at Fomovo or to bear defiance and decla-
ration of war such as Montjoye took to Venice in 1 509, but as ambassadors.
Montjoye, sovereign king of arms of France, was indeed sent to many of
the European courts and in 1500 to interview Bajazet in Adrianople,
though in each case he came to demand or announce rather than to bluff
or cajole.

And beside these official negotiations moved a shadow diplomacy of
secret agents, spies and informers. Merchants and bankers were used
particularly by the Italians, and the Medici were often better informed
by their branch at Lyons, with its contacts at the court, than by their am-
bassadors. Venice favoured doctors, who were likely to be near monarchs
at their least guarded moments. Charles V used members of religious
orders as spies, and under Francis I a staff of secret agents was built up
which comprised noblemen and women as well as obscure clerics and
adventurers. Ambassadors did their best to gain informers at the courts
to which they were accredited. Sebastiano Giustiniani gained so much
information from the Papal Nuncio in England, Francesco Chieregato,
whom he always referred to in his dispatches as ‘the friend’, that he
begged the signory to offer him some preferment — cautioning that they
should do this in cipher, lest the plot be discovered.

The large bulk of diplomatic writings show how closely governments
were kept in touch with events abroad by their residents. Omitting
formal documents like safe conducts and letters of credence, they fall into
three classes: instructions, dispatches and reports. The first outline the
purpose of the mission, tell the ambassador how to get to his destination,
whom to contact there, and in what terms to put his government’s case.
As these instructions were sometimes shown on arrival as a proof of good
will, the style tended to be formal. But ambassadors often carried secret
instructions as well, guarded closely and shown only to some trusted indi-
vidual, and these were often couched in vigorous and striking terms,
suggesting the exact arguments to be employed.

From his arrival the ambassador was to send back regular accounts of
his activities, and since information was one of the main profits of an
embassy, he was expected to write as often as possible. Machiavelli

20 269 kchk i

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

sent back forty-nine dispatches in fifty days on his first legation at Rome,
and though this is exceptional at least one a week was looked for, even
from residents of long standing. Conversations with important persons
were to be reported verbatim, together with every fact or rumour that could
conceivably be of interest. The ambassador’s impressions were valued
too, his pen-portraits being the only way of enabling governments to
imagine the men with whom they were dealing, the use of official portraits
being limited. In a letter of advice to a novice ambassador to Spain, his
young friend Rafaello Girolami, Machiavelli indicated the scope of the
information required. He was first to send news of his arrival and an
account of his interview with the king. Then he was to observe and report
on everything that concerned the king and his country : whether Charles
(the letter was written in 1522) was resolute or the tool of others; miserly
or liberal ; warlike or peaceful. Was a thirst for glory his dominant passion,
or some other? Was he popular? Did he prefer Spain to the Netherlands?
Who were the men who influenced him; what were their aims; were they
open to corruption? What was the feeling towards Charles of the country
at large? — all these and many other particulars, if well grounded and
reported, would bring honour to an ambassador. Governments relied on
their residents, moreover, for news about neighbouring states where they
were not represented. When relations between Venice and England were
broken, the Venetian resident in France had to send English news as well;
when there was no agent in Turin, Venice received information about
Savoy through Milan.

On his return a resident ambassador made a report, sometimes,
especially in Italy, in writing. This was the invariable rule in Venice where
the reading of a report by an ambassador in a full meeting of the senate
was an important occasion. As the usual duration of an embassy was
from two to three years, the practice meant that the senate was regularly
informed as to the political, economic and social position of each country
with whom it had dealings. The reports were expected to be full, the
ceremony of presenting them was never scamped, and the reputation of
envoys was considerably affected by their delivery.

In writings that passed between governments and their representatives,
the vernacular was increasingly used from the beginning of the second
quarter of the fifteenth century. By the end of the century, this was true
even of the reports of papal nuncios. And foreign languages were
increasingly learned by diplomats and statesmen. English and Italian
ambassadors in France both commonly spoke French, and so did the
Swiss. Princes showed their favour by receiving ambassadors in their
own language, even if it were no more than a set speech learned for the
occasion. French, owing to the diplomatic activity of Louis XI and his
successors, and to its being the language of the German court under
Maximilian, was beginning to insinuate itself as a second diplomatic

270

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

language, although Latin was undergoing revival at the same time.
Latin was used for international documents like treaties and safe con-
ducts ; it was used, faute de mieux, for international bargaining, and it was
also used to imply a compliment — but whereas the vernacular was used
to indulge the weaker party, Latin was used to flatter the stronger; it was
also common to present a formal address in Latin, then to proceed in the
vernacular. Though Latin, thanks to humanist stimulus, was more
genuinely an international language than it had been for centuries of
vernacular debasement and local pronunciation, its utility, in fact, no
longer equalled its prestige.

In correspondence, of course, it suffered from the very qualities that
commended it when spoken, for here privacy, not universal comprehension,
was needed, and the uncertainty of posts and of diplomatic immunity led
to the use of cipher to supplement the vernacular. Books were written
on the subject. The Polygraphia libri sex of Abbot Johannes Trithemius
was dedicated to Maximilian I. Usually only crucial passages were
ciphered, but some chanceries, particularly that of Spain, favoured
dispatches that were written entirely in code. Some of these were ex-
tremely complicated and difficult to break ; they were likely to be tedious
to compose (for example enviando, ‘sending’, was by one Spanish
method encoded as ‘DccccLxvnn le No y malusj ’) and impossible to
decipher. The Spanish chancery found it necessary to simplify its codes
in 1504.

The actual utility of dispatches, however frequently, fully and secretly
written, depended on the posts, and these were still uncertain. There were
private services, notably that run by the Tassis family in northern and
central Europe ; in France and Italy there were official postal services, but
though the cheapest medium, they offered the least security. And special
couriers were so expensive that there was a temptation to delay dispatches
until a bundle was accumulated, thus destroying much of the value of
the earlier ones. Once a post, a courier or a travelling merchant or friendly
diplomat had been found, communication between France, Italy, and
Germany was not unreasonably slow. Typical speeds were: Rome-Paris,
twelve days ; Rome-Venice, two to three days ; Turin-Venice, six to seven
days. Where a sea crossing was involved, times were less certain. Twenty
to thirty days from Venice to London was usual and though a herald
crossed from Seville to Venice in 1499 in fifteen days, it took thirty for
the news of Isabella’s death in 1 504 to come to Rome.

Yet for all this activity, the host of couriers, the hundreds of dispatches,
the resident ambassador was still far from being accepted as a normal,
permanent element in European diplomacy. Writers of works de lega-
tionibus tended to ignore or minimise the part he played. His often
obscure birth — it was some time before the education of gentlemen
prepared enough of them for the duties of a resident — counted against

271 ao-2

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

him. Though diplomatic immunity was a long-standing principle of civil
and canon law, and there had been few instances of the molestation of
occasional ambassadors, the resident was not so safe. His social position
did not protect him to the same extent, and because of his ceaseless
search for information he tended to be looked on as a dubiously licensed
spy. Wolsey opened French and Venetian dispatches and seized the papers
and ciphers of the nuncio Chieregato, and Venetian agents in Constan-
tinople were treated with open hostility on occasion ; their lodgings were
watched, they were insulted by the people and even imprisoned and
tortured.

The contrast was most pointed in the chronic impoverishment of the
average resident. Money was lavished on the special ambassador —
magistrate, knight or bishop — to enable him to impress the prince he was
visiting, but the greatest kings did not feel their reputation suffered if
their resident — as was the case with Ferdinand’s ambassador at London,
de Puebla — lived in a miserable and disreputable squalor. Machiavelli’s
dispatches from France are full of complaints about the inconvenience
of being forced to follow an itinerant king without having money for
horses, to frequent a court while being unable to afford clean clothes and
to write frequent dispatches without money for couriers.

The same indifference to their residents abroad was shown by the
long periods during which governments sent no instructions, though
letters expressing good will to the regime and containing news were
essential to a diplomat as they were the means of his gaining good will
and news himself. And to this silence was added the indignity that the
residents’ own dispatches were not always believed ; Venice, for instance,
was kept from enjoying all the benefits of her own diplomats by suspecting
them of becoming corrupted by life abroad.

It was to be long before the gap between the status of standing and
special ambassadors narrowed. Meanwhile the lot of the resident was
felt to be unduly hard when neglect and distrust at home were added to
the dangers of travel and the fatigues of court attendance abroad. Con-
stant were the requests to be relieved, and severe measures had to be taken
against newly appointed ambassadors who refused to go. The plea for
exemption of Zachario Contarini, elected Venetian ambassador to Hun-
gary in 1500, is a reminder that the changed diplomacy of the Italian
wars still took place under familiar conditions. His request was only
granted on the score that he had a sick wife and ten children, that he had
been on ten previous embassies, three of them across the Alps, that in
Germany the king of the Romans had lodged him in a house where there
was a man dead of the plague, and that his father and two other relatives
had died from the rigours involved in being an ambassador.

The tendency of the Powers to expand had made combinations necessary,
but as there were no traditional friendships, no conventional axis, there

272

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

was no trust or security, especially as all coveted one prize — Italy. The
result was a cunning diplomacy, levity with regard to international
agreements and an atmosphere of uncertainty, fear and mistrust. At the
highest level, it would be hazardous to suggest that political morality was
any worse during this period than before or since. Whenever it is
convenient to break faith, excuses are to hand : King John’s scrupulousness
in returning to English captivity after the inadvertent breach of his parole
after Poitiers was not, after all, characteristic of his age. At a lower
level, among the diplomats, especially among the new residents, suspected
and suspicious, unprotected by clear conventions of immunity, without
the support of belonging to a definite, confident caste — here there was
much that tempted men to be furtive, to adopt means that were crafty
and oblique.

The fact that standing diplomacy was not yet taken for granted added
to the air of uncertainty and suspicion. Princes who were glad to receive
information about their neighbours resented attempts to discover their
own. The aim of a diplomat was moreover to outwit, to deceive without
being deceived — an aim formulated by Commynes from the behaviour
of Louis XI, who not only boasted of the useful lies he had told, but
preferred to use occasional ambassadors on the grounds that the promises
of one might be disowned by the next. Ingenuity in cunning became
almost comical with the use of disguises, concealed messages, and princes
hiding one ambassador so that he could hear the false words of another.
Nor were diplomats always servants simply of one state. Commynes,
trusted adviser of the French Crown, was in the pay of Florence, who
wished to reverse French policy, and the Florentine embassies for this
purpose to the French court themselves contained elements hostile to
their own government and favourable to Charles VIII. A general feeling
of insecurity, coupled with the dissolution of international sanctions,
produced an attitude to political affairs that has been named after the
man who lived through it, learned from it, and codified it — Machiavelli.

From 1499 he was sent on a series of missions both abroad and to other
Italian states, and the defiant amoralism of The Prince sprang directly
from this contact with the ruthless and distrustful nature of contemporary
diplomacy. Repeatedly snubbed or ignored as the representative of a
weak state, he saw that a country was only respected when it was strong,
and its strength had to be in arms. Repeatedly hampered by the hesitant
policy of his employers, he saw that half measures were useless, neutrality
a form of suicide. From the French gibe that Florence was Ser Nihilo,
Mr Nothing, he saw that in the modern world money and arms alone
counted, and in a life-and-death struggle a small man must sometimes
hit below the belt. These lessons of the first mission to France in 1500
were confirmed by his meeting with the forceful Cesare Borgia in 1502.
In the following year he passed them on to his fellow countrymen.

273

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Florence was threatened by Cesare, by the Pisans, and by a French army
on its way south to Naples, and was debating whether to arm or, as usual,
to negotiate. Machiavelli took as his theme : without arms cities perish.
Do not trust friends, today enmity is the norm ; do not trust treaties, today
princes are held only by the threat of war, ‘for I tell you that fortune
will not help those who will not help themselves, nor will the heavens —
nor can they — sustain a thing that is determined to destroy itself’. 1 And
subsequent missions, including three more to France, strengthened his
opinion that Florence must be strong, and — just as a strong monarchy
had made a fighting Power out of the fickle and light-minded French —
must have a resolute leader, and finally that in this leader’s policy there
could be no place for scruple. These were the lessons of his career, and
when after his dismissal in 1512 he determined to tell Italy through
The Prince how to be strong, how to hold her own in a world of war, craft
and crisis, he repeated them. Though idealistic about Italy as a cultural
whole, he was realistic about Italy as a workable and defensible unit,
and the Italy he wished to see unified had its base in Tuscany and the
Romagna, where resistance would focus and prevent further partition.
Here, if he modelled himself on the nearly successful Cesare, prepared
resolutely for war, and remembered the sort of lessons provided by the
unscrupulous contemporary governments, a prince might stop the cotiapse
of Italy. Be honourable and tell the truth, he was to advise the young
diplomat Rafaello Girolami, but if you cannot, then dissemble your lies,
or at least be ready with a plausible defence. Similarly the prince must
not sacrifice his country to his sense of honour, nor accept, for the sake
of a code that no one else will observe, the contemptuous appellation of
Ser Nihilo.

It was not only the small states who were forced to negotiate from
weakness. The costs of war, already crippling in the fourteenth century,
had risen again so steeply with changes in the equipment and composition
of armies that no Power was always in possession of, for instance, sufficient
artillery or the ready cash to pay mercenaries. Time after time bluff and
ingenuity were used to fill in the space between a threat or a promise and
the ability to implement them. The result was an exaggerated importance
attached to the personal aspect of negotiation, the ability of one side
to impress, or mislead the other. Guicciardini, in one of his Ricordi,
says:

In sending forth ambassadors to treat with foreign courts, certain princes will
freely make known to them their secret mind and the ends their negotiations are
meant to serve. Others, again, judge it better only to impart what they would have
the foreign prince persuaded of, thinking they can hardly deceive him unless they
first deceive the ambassador who is to be the instrument and agent for treating
with him. Something is to be said in favour of both these methods

1 Parole da dirle sopra la provisione del danaio.

274

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

But care must be taken that under the persuasive influence of Italian
writers either the subtlety, or the realism, of Renaissance diplomacy is
not exaggerated.

The credence given to the possibility of a crusade, or the effectiveness
of a general council, may be taken to symbolise the continuation of a
conservative approach to affairs that coexisted with a revolutionary
change in method. It was still believed that dramatic personal intervention
could be an effective substitute for prolonged expert negotiation, that
eloquence was a substitute for common sense, that bribes could corrupt
the enemy’s agents, while his own gold was powerless. In many ways
Renaissance diplomacy was obtuse and irrational. It must not be for-
gotten that in the world of Guicciardini and Ferdinand the Catholic
naivete still played its part.

Guicciardini saw the first generation of the Italian wars as a period of
revolution, and wrote in another of the Ricordi :

Before the year 1494 wars were protracted, battles bloodless, the methods followed
in besieging towns slow and uncertain ; and although artillery was already in use, it
was managed with such want of skill that it caused little hurt. Hence it came about
that the ruler of a state could hardly be dispossessed. But the French, on their
invasion of Italy, infused so much liveliness into our wars, that up to the year 1521,
whenever the open country was lost, the state was lost with it.

And, indeed, the renewed superiority of defence over attack, a turning-
point symbolised by Prospero Colonna’s defence at Milan in 1521, was
revolutionary, for it affected the entire nature of campaigns, slowing them
down, emphasising strategy and political action at the expense of tactics,
mere skill and bravery, substituting the desire to be victorious in a cam-
paign for the urge to win a series of fights, and raising formidable problems
of recruitment and supply. But if the French could make no impression
on Milan, the same year saw the Turks break down one after the other
the fortresses guarding the approaches to Belgrade. Above all, this was
a period in which the old-fashioned and the advanced existed together;
it was a period of real transition.

While some towns had learned the use of the bastion and the low,
thick wall, others retained their towers and the tall thin curtain walls
that meant so much to civic pride; the crossbow was still used side by
side with the arquebus ; artillery was dragged into action but was seldom
properly exploited ; tactics were being modified in the face of firearms and
the use of field fortifications, but still on occasion sacrificed experience to
blind over-confidence; professional troops, steady and skilled, fought
with their own up-to-date weapons along with nervous amateurs, cheaply
and often archaically equipped by the State; and dispassionate and
scientific preparation might still be jeopardised by a chivalrous appeal to
chance.

275

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The pace of change was fast, because wars were almost constant, the
effects of change were widespread, because unprecedented numbers of
men were involved. And although many books on military matters were
printed, these changes owed nothing to theoretical writers, but were
forced by circumstances on intelligent commanders like Gonzalo de
Cordoba and the marquis of Pescara. Most books simply repeated the
lessons of classical military theorists, like Vegetius and Frontinus. Works
that contained detailed technological advice like Leonardo’s note-books,
or Francesco di Giorgio’s work on fortification, remained in manuscript.
From the De Re Militari of Robertus Valturius, printed at Verona in
1472, books contained illustrations of new weapons, it is true, but these
were often based on misunderstood descriptions of classical siege engines,
and had little relevance to actual warfare in the field. Again, it was not
until Battista della Valle’s Libro continente appertenentie ad Capitanii
appeared in 1528 that guns were included in the diagrams of troop for-
mations derived from classical descriptions.

The outstanding example of a work dealing with war in a soberly
realistic spirit is the Nef des Princes et des batailles of Robert de Balsac,
seigneur d’Entragues. It was printed in 1502, and reflects the military
experience of its author in the Armagnac and Breton campaigns of
Louis XI, and in the Italian wars of Charles VIII. The conventional
moralising tone of the first part of this work has caused it to be neglected,
but the second part bluntly advises a prince how to succeed in war.
It takes full account of artillery, giving close descriptions of siege work,
and stressing the usefulness of light artillery and hand-guns in the field.
He recommends the prince ruthlessly to adopt a scorched earth policy
when it is needed, and urges the use of spies, both before and during a
campaign. He emphasises the importance of flexibility in an army: all
enemies cannot be fought alike, their special characteristics must be
studied and the prince must dispose his own forces accordingly. He
dwells on the dangers of indiscipline, and unlicensed booty, and suggests
that the troops’ morale should be kept up by the deliberate circulation
of encouraging rumours. While recommending an exact keeping of faith
in treaties, he warns the prince never to expect honesty of others, par-
ticularly during a truce. He concludes with a comment that owes less
to classical precedent : ‘ most important of all, success in war depends on
having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs ’.

Actual analogies between Roman and contemporary war would emerge
more fully in the next generation, when an emphasis on caution rather
than valour was better appreciated, and when cavalry, by adopting missile
weapons on a large scale, came to resemble the cavalry of the ancients,
but there was already one topic on which the Roman was also a contem-
porary voice, discipline. Time after time success was jeopardised by lack
of it. Looking back over the astonishing success of Charles VIII’s march

276

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

to Naples, and recalling the number of times when the army was on the
point of breaking up, Commynes concluded that ‘ it must of necessity be
acknowledged that God Almighty conducted the enterprise’. The difficulty
was twofold. Mercenary troops were unreliable: they fought only for
money, and when this was short they either became insubordinate, or
disbanded. Native troops called up for an emergency were easier to
control, but they lacked the training and stamina of professional troops,
and were more liable to panic in combat. There were very few permanent
troops, well trained, and prepared to fight for their country as well as for
cash. Monarchs had personal guards, key fortresses were garrisoned,
the personnel of certain services, like pay and artillery, were kept in being,
but in case of war reliance was placed on native levies, volunteers, and
mercenaries. The supply of cavalry was not a grave problem ; the noble-
man was educated for war. But tactics were not dominated any more by
cavalry; the main problem was to secure good infantrymen.

The obstacles were part administrative, part temperamental. It was
difficult to raise enough money to keep a large number of troops during
periods of inactivity, and there was no body of trained men who could
serve as the effective cadre of new units, to see that they were properly
brigaded and drilled and equipped ; and it was not always easy to persuade
men of the advantages of a military career. Neither urban bourgeois
nor prosperous peasant was willing to give up a modest but certain
livelihood for the alternatives of death or a fortune in loot, as attempts to
raise national armies in France and Germany repeatedly showed. Floren-
tine writers deplored the debilitating effects of trade and luxury, and their
complaints culminated in Machiavelli’s denunciation of a way of life
that had led to the separation of the two aspects of political life — civil
and military — whose union had guaranteed the freedom, and had led
to the greatness, of Rome.

In the Art of War (1521) he described the ideal condition: that war
should be waged, not by hired foreign professionals, but by the citizens
themselves, so that ‘everyone may be ready to go to war in order to
procure a good peace, and no one presume to disturb the peace in order
to stir up a war’. But the avoidance of professional feeling could not
be reconciled with effective training and discipline; by insisting that his
model army should be thoroughly loyal, he made it impossible for it to
be thoroughly efficient. The Florentine militia of 1 506 incorporated many
of his ideas: captains were frequently switched from command to command,
for instance, to avoid personal loyalty detracting from loyalty to the State;
the evils of militaristic rule were avoided by interposing political commit-
tees. A loyal Florentine noted in his diary that ‘this was thought the
finest thing that had ever been arranged for Florence’, but the rout of the
militia at Prato in 1 5 1 2 , on the return of the Medici, revealed the inadequacy
of half-trained troops in modern war. Infantry which fell much below

277

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

the standard of the best was useless, and the best — the German and Swiss
pikemen, and the Spanish and professional Italian arquebusiers — owed
their efficiency to the fact that they lived primarily for war. Spain and
Switzerland were the only western countries which produced an infantry
that was at once native and professional. Maximilian attempted first to
raise a militia, and when this failed, to canalise the energies of the free-
booting Landsknechte and foster their morale by building up their loyalty
to the throne. What religion had done for the Hussites, and patriotism
for the Swiss, the imperial ideal would perform for the Landsknechte.
But neither the glamour of new military orders, no longer shunning the
foot soldier, nor the efforts of his publicists, could shake the troops’
conviction that their loyalty was to a captain of their own choosing
rather than an abstraction more notable for fine sentiments than regular
pay. Tactically, the Landsknechte improved until they rivalled the Swiss,
but they remained a terror to their own country in peace time, in war
were prepared to fight for the Empire’s enemies, and on occasions such as
the Sack of Rome in 1527 showed how fruitless had been Maximilian’s
attempts to substitute anything higher for their narrow esprit de corps.

France possessed the largest standing army among the western Powers,
but apart from the artillery service, it was composed entirely of horse:
the king’s household troops and the gendarmerie, the first continually in
service, the latter alternating garrison duty with long periods of leave.
In time of war, the ban and arriere-ban — the levy of tenants owing military
service for their fiefs — could be made to produce cavalry of variable
quality, but the copious categories of exemptions from this service, and
the preference of the military-minded for regular service with the gendar-
merie, robbed this levy of much of its usefulness. There was no regular
infantry. The francs archers still existed in posse, but their poor showing
at Guinegate (1479) had proved them to be unreliable, and the Crown
depended on bandes recruited by captains holding the king’s commission
wherever suitable men could be found to volunteer, and especially in
Gascony and Picardy. Louis XII, faced by the defection of the Swiss in
1509, tried to organise a national infantry, and to resurrect the francs
archers in 1513, but, as in Germany, only the least promising material
was willing to serve, and problems of administration proved too great.
For the rest of the period France relied on foreign mercenaries, when
possible, the Swiss, when not, Landsknechte.

In artillery France had no serious rival, and the special importance her
kings had attached to this arm was demonstrated by the expense to which
they went to import metal and technicians, and by the grave risks run
by the retreating army of 1495 to bring back their field and siege guns
safely over the Apennines and the Alps.

In Spain, although the only permanent element in the army was a
detachment of 2500 heavy horse, the guardas viejas, this was not the coun-

278

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

competence and were later to become the secretaires d'etat. The supreme
courts, which had gradually become separated from the king’s court,
were being constituted side by side with the Conseil du roi, with more
precise functions established by ordinances. The existence of the Grand
Conseil was recognised by the ordinance of 1498. The Parlement was still
the supreme organ of the judiciary, and since the middle of the fifteenth
century a number of regulations had completed the definition of its powers
and procedure. Alongside it, the Chambre des Comptes and the Cour des
Aides supervised the financial system.

In this way, the organisation of central government was being settled
during the period of peace following the turmoil of the wars with England.
The system seemed to be moving towards marked centralisation, but that
did not exclude certain centrifugal tendencies. The kingdom was too
extensive and the newly assimilated feudal states were still too autonomous
to allow this centralisation to be complete or permanent. In place of the
Estates General that were falling into abeyance, provincial estates were
being organised; side by side with the supreme courts, which sat at the
Palais de la citi, in Paris, others were being set up in the provinces with
supreme powers which rendered appeals to the Paris Parlement un-
necessary. This movement had begun in earlier reigns with the Parlements
of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Grenoble, but during the reign of Louis XII
the existence of those of Rouen, Dijon and Aix was ratified, while at
Rennes a similar organisation was being initiated for the duchy of Brittany,
which had some direct links with the Crown. At the same time, the king-
dom was divided into four great financial districts, known as the generality .
These were the generalites of Languedoil, Languedoc, Normandy and
Outre-Seine-et-Yonne, and to them the newly assimilated provinces of
Picardy, Burgundy, Dauphine, Provence, Brittany and Guyenne were
soon added. This arrangement, which had been dictated by historical
necessity, was destined to be reorganised in such a way as to become more
homogeneous and more easily supervised by the central administration.
But this improvisation foreshadowed reforms that were to be made later
in financial administration. If we enter into the details of provincial
organisation, we see that other changes were heralding the approach of
modem times. While the towns had for several centuries been endowed
with councils and genuine constitutions guaranteed by charters, the
villages were now tending to organise themselves into communautis
d'habitants. In order to facilitate the apportionment and collection of
the faille, more and more villages held meetings and set up a rudimentary
form of municipal administration. In addition, a few privileges of franchise
were being granted, especially in connection with the administration of
justice. These were the earliest developments of local powers which were
subsequently to become more active.

The same tendency could be observed in legislative matters. The kings,

299

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

or enfeoffed by them, as were the Orsini and Colonna by a king of Naples
afraid, like Venice, to arm his own barons. Italy’s weakness was not that
she relied on mercenaries, nor that her wars smacked more of the chess-
board than the shambles ; Italian troops had already shown at the Ponte
di Crevola in 1487 that they could defeat the Swiss, her artillery was not
so seriously inferior in quality to that of the French — whose instructor
she had been — as her embittered historians suggested : it was in disunity,
in divided command, in excessive reliance on political action that the
weakness lay — as the fortunes of Fornovo showed.

Machiavelli’s suggestion that to employ mercenaries was a mark of
moral weakness and political folly was, after all, very misleading. Since
the last campaigns of the Hundred Years War, the Hussite wars, and the
conflict between Swiss and Burgundians, it was clear that armies needed
a combination of arms, and no country was suited to produce them all.
England, for instance, the most unified of states, and not the least wisely
governed, was forced to rely on foreigners to fight for her. English horses
were too squat and weak to support armour and barding, and Burgundian
cavalry was hired instead. The infantry of the shire levies were used only
to bow and bill, and German pikemen had to supply the essential stiffening
of heavy infantry. The drawbacks were largely financial and in fact had
little to do with morale; faulty methods of command would have cancelled
out much of the advantage of a national army over a cosmopolitan one,
and it would be hazardous to suggest that a soldier, except in defensive
campaigns, fought for his country rather than for his pay. While the states
of the west were, nevertheless, trying to lessen their dependence on mer-
cenaries, and to develop standing armies, the reverse was true in the east.
The fact that in Moldavia recruitment was based on land ownership, and
that the call to arms against the Turk brought out landlord and tenant
in an association familiar from the fields, kept discipline and morale
high, and this cohesion was aided by the fact that there was no tactical
split between classes : all travelled on horseback, and all fought on foot.
But in Roumania, where the free peasant could only pay the tribute
extorted by the Turks by selling the right in his property to the landlord, a
rift occurred between the two classes. The peasants could no longer afford
modern weapons, they were less willing to fight for an exploiting class,
and the boiars no longer wished to arm them. As a result the government
turned increasingly to mercenaries from Poland, the Baltic and the west.

In contrast to the Christian states, the Turks not only had a large and
balanced standing army, but the whole machinery of state could be
adjusted instantly from peace to war. The army was recruited from young
Christian captives specially conditioned by a long educational discipline
to be devoted to the sultan and his faith. The janissaries (infantry)
numbered about 12,000, the sipahis (cavalry) 10,000 to 12,000, but as
each had to bring from two to six more horsemen with him the number

280

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

was perhaps 40,000 to 50,000. To the sipahis were added in wartime
feudal levies that produced at least another 50,000 horse from Europe,
another 30,000 from Asia, for territory had been granted on condition
that the owners resided and kept order in peace, and brought troops
when called to war. There were besides large numbers of irregular troops
whose belief that death for the faith would lead to instant felicity made
possible their use as cannon fodder. In numbers, training and devotion
the Turkish armies were without peer. Fortunately for Christendom
there were weaknesses. There was a disproportionate number of cavalry ;
so large a standing body was restless when there was no war; each sultan
owed his throne to their support, and though half-worshipped he was
also half victimised by their desire for action; the unity of the army under
the sultan meant that it could not be split to fight on two fronts — when
there was an attack in the east peace had to be made in the west, as in
1503, when the Persians invaded under Shah Isma'il and peace was made
with Venice.

All these armies were accompanied by a host of camp followers,
largely women and children, who foraged for food, cooked, tended the
wounded and helped with the building of fortifications ; the Germans had
a special officer, the Hurenweibel, to deal with them. And the lives of still
other civilians were closely linked to war; food was not, as a rule, provided
by the military authorities, the men were expected to buy their own from
the agents who obtained produce from the country as the army moved
along. There were, besides, dealers who followed in the hope of making
a profit by turning booty into cash. These civilians could seriously impede
the progress of an army on the march ; numbers can be gauged by those
attached to the French army, which had entered Italy with some 40,000 men,
and was still followed, after the long and arduous retreat of 1495, by some
10,000 non-combatants.

The most important technical changes in this period were those made
in the art of fortification. The domination of battlefields by the pike
affected the composition of armies, the increasing use of firearms affected
their equipment and slowly influenced tactics, but, as Guicciardini showed,
the fact that defence had once more overtaken attack altered the whole
nature of campaigns — and, consequently, their financial and diplomatic
background.

The success of French artillery earlier in the fifteenth century had
revealed the weakness of tall, thin walls, which had withstood the plunging
fire of wooden siege-engines, but were vulnerable to the horizontal fire
of guns, especially when metal balls were used. A little had been done
before the sudden challenge of 1494. A few French castles had been
rebuilt with thicker walls, gun-ports had been provided for the defenders’
guns, but most of these were merely round holes, and few (for instance,
the Tour des Rondes at Blaye) showed a trace of the external splay that

281

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

was to become habitual in the middle of the next century. But the most
significant innovation, the bastion, had hardly been hinted at in practice.
The need for effective flanking fire emerged as soon as breaches (which
ruined the curtain defences, machicolations and hourds) became commoner
than scaling attacks, and walls became too thick for the defenders to
watch the ground immediately below them. The bastion was a solid
construction projecting from the curtain, and of about the same height,
sometimes curved, but presenting, as a rule, an angle to the field, with
supporting guns capable of taking in flank any assault on the curtain,
and covering the blind spots of the neighbouring bastion. Compromises
had been made by cutting down towers and strengthening them with
earth, and various designs had been sketched by Francesco di Giorgio,
but the first true bastion to be built would appear to have been the
Boulevard of Auvergne (1496) on Rhodes, an island forced to be in the
van of progress by the threats of Turkish invasion. Italian architects,
who had only played with the idea of the angle bastion before 1494,
developed it rapidly after the shock of seeing defence after defence fall
to the French. But for another generation the emphasis was on the
modification of old fortifications rather than the building — at very great
expense — of new ones. Citizens preferred to defend a breach with ad hoc
internal works, ditches commanded by guns raised on the spoil thrown
up on the inside. This technique had proved serviceable in France and
defeated the fine imperial artillery at Padua in 1509. Only with the
rebuilding of the fortifications of Verona in 1520 were large-scale works
embarked on, and for another generation they were a feature only of
places of great strategic importance. By 1520, too, the explosive mine,
perfected in the first ten years of the wars, had been largely countered
either by warning devices like bells placed on drums round the walls,
by sinking vents to disperse the blast of the explosion, or by deepening
moats.

Artillery underwent a great change in the last generation of the fifteenth
and the first of the sixteenth century. By the end of the Italian wars it
had achieved a form not substantially altered for 300 years. The period
of wasteful experiment, as with huge guns with screwed-in breeches
which could fire only a few times a day, was over by 1494. Princes like
Ercole d’Este and James IV of Scotland were artillery enthusiasts, and
Maximilian’s interest, emphasised in the propagandist Weisskunig and
Teuerdank, was emulated by Henry VIII. The constructional difficulties
in building a long gun with a very wide bore had been recognised, and
mere size was given up in the interests of portability and accuracy,
qualities much enhanced by improved gun carriages and the invention of
the trunnion. Indeed, a light artillery, which could keep up easily with
armies on the march, and could be shifted about in the course of a battle,
had been pioneered in Burgundy and was exploited by the French.

282

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

Against masonry guns were extremely effective; against men the effects
were uncertain: in many engagements casualties were absurdly small in
proportion to the shots fired, though at Ravenna — a battle whose fortunes
were decided by guns, which dislodged the Spanish cavalry from its forti-
fied position and forced an attack — a single shot was claimed to have
struck down thirty-three men. Instead of stone balls which tended to
shatter on impact, the use of iron balls was spreading. As yet there was
no uniformity of type — the terms cannon and culverin are vague, and
guns were built to the whim of a prince or founder. Francis I inherited
seventeen different calibres, Charles V fifty. The supply and transport of
ammunition was thus a complicated and wasteful task.

Portable firearms were no longer startling curiosities, and by the end
of this period were the dominant missile weapon. The longbow had an
effective range of some 250 yards, and could readily fire six shafts a
minute; the killing range of the crossbow was from 220 to 250 yards, or,
with square-ended armour-tearing bolts, 150 to 200 yards, and it fired
one shaft a minute: the steel military bows had to be cocked with a wind-
lass or cranequin. But, save in England, the latter was far more widely
used, because against horse and armour weight and accuracy mattered
more than range and speed. And this fact favoured the arquebus. Its
useful range, even at the end of the wars, was hardly 400 yards, but its
heavy bullet caused the crossbow to be relegated to sea warfare and siege
work during the i52o’s. Thanks to the introduction of the matchlock, it
was no longer necessary to hold the gun (necessarily very small, but
heavy, for its weight to absorb the recoil) in one hand and to dab the
match against a touch-hole with the other; the marksman now had both
hands steadying the arquebus at the moment of firing, and all his con-
centration on his victim, not half on the match. By the end of the period
the wheel-lock had appeared, which made the arquebus into a tolerably
effective cavalry weapon and opened the way for the development of
the pistol. Stocks were made to rest against the chest or hip and some-
times to fit against the shoulder, and used as some of the heaviest were,
with a rest stuck into the ground, a gun could be fired with reasonable
accuracy. They were at first used mainly to defend fortified positions, but
by 1512 had come out into the field, protected by pikemen, over whose
heads they fired, and soon were used even without this defence as an
independent arm to give covering or galling fire. The effect of gunfire was
greater on formations, which had to be thinned against it, than on armour
which had already been so far strengthened against crossbow quarrels
that it was proof at least against spent or glancing bullets. The first great
age of the gunsmith was also the finest age of the armourer.

During the first generation after the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII,
armour underwent a stylistic revolution, caused by the blending of Italian
with German and French tastes which resulted in the production (for the

283

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

rich, at least) of suits in the Maximilian style, elaborately fluted and en-
graved. It is interesting that in the age of gunpowder’s most rapid de-
velopment, the armourer was called upon to introduce changes not so
much in the interest of increased protection, but of additional beauty and
comfort. Monarchs like Charles VIII and Louis XII not only patronised
armour but collected it, and the growing complication of the tourney,
with its several types of combat, each needing special reinforcing or
replacement pieces, provided a stimulus to the armourer just as powerful
as war itself.

Armour, and the armourers’ weapons, lance, pike, halberd and sword,
continued to decide the fortunes of battle. At Cerignola (1503) the
danger of attacking a fortified position protected by arquebuses had been
shown. At Ravenna (1512) artillery had determined how part of the battle
was to be fought, but not the way in which it was to be won. At Marignano
(1515) artillery had gravely altered the course of events by galling columns
of infantry brought to a standstill by cavalry charges. And at Bicocca
(1522) and Pavia (1525) victory was determined by the use of artillery
and, still more, the arquebus, at the former in a defensive position, in the
latter in open country. But before these two battles gunpowder had
stung tactics into contorted positions, the need of a careful overhaul of
equipment not, however, being appreciated. The most dangerous threat
still came from the massed column of pike.

The Swiss, whose defeat of the Burgundian cavalry at Grandson and
Morat in 1476 had caused such general concern among military men,
fought in compact squares of about 6000 men, eighty-five shoulder to
shoulder, on a hundred-yard-long front, and some seventy ranks deep.
The success of this formation depended on rigid discipline and strict drill.
Nothing could be allowed to divert the pressure or resistance of the square
till it was crippled or victorious ; no prisoners could be taken, the wounded
were ignored. A cavalry charge at such a square met first a solid hedge of
steel, the pike heads of the first four ranks, then halberds, taking advantage
of broken order to stab at close quarters or to grapple from the flank and
hook a horseman down, then at the centre of the square broadswords
which could swing at a man still mounted or be grasped below the hilt
to thrust at those unhorsed. An infantry charge was met first by ranks
of halberds which struck down the points of the pikes, then by row after
row of pikes in front and in the flanks by swordsmen and crossbows and
arquebusiers issuing from the centre and rear of the phalanx. Unlike
another infantry that had defeated heavy cavalry, the English bowmen,
the Swiss could attack, and because their morale was so high, they wore
little armour and could attack fast and in firm order. In this case they
were preceded by bows and guns which harassed the evolutions of the
enemy and then retired to let the square come through, bristling with
pikes and moving with a momentum irresistible unless thinned by heavy

284

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

fire or disrupted by uneven ground. When numbers allowed, the Swiss
used three squares in echelon to foil flank movements and to maintain a
reserve, a practice triumphantly successful, but for the last time, at
Novara (1513).

These tactics were soon copied, first by the princes of Germany and
by the French, then by the Spaniards and Italians. The Landsknechte were
the most faithful copy, but were less well drilled and led, partly because
captaincies went to the highest bidder, not to the most efficient soldier, and
they did not reach their peak until the second decade of the sixteenth
century, by which time the front ranks were composed of veterans. The
Spaniards and Italians accepted the Swiss example more cautiously and
without losing their own characteristic of greater manoeuvrability, for
the Swiss manner had serious disadvantages. The squares were easy
marks for missiles, and retained their dense composition even when
firearms had become really effective. They were not suited to bad terrain,
nor were they apt for siege work. They were cumbrous and inelastic in
evolution, and were at their best when an enemy attacked in the old manner
of battle against battle, like arm against like arm. In Italy they found
more flexible armies, combining cavalry and infantry, undismayed by
rough country, and making careful use of field fortification. Until the
pike allied itself systematically with the arquebus the victory was with the
more varied force that could harass and outflank it before delivering a
death-blow. That the Italians were defeated by the direct tactics of the
Swiss and the direct strategy of the French was largely the fault not of
their armies but their commanders and their governments.

The need to counter Swiss-plan infantry led to a notably increased
split between heavy and light infantry. Gonzalo de Cordoba, for in-
stance, while increasing the armour of his pikemen, armed more and more
of his other infantry with guns, and they acted increasingly on their own
as these became more effective: the tendency throughout the wars was
towards heavy shock troops on the one hand, fast light missile troops on
the other.

The increasing prestige of infantry — Gonzalo’s pikemen included
noblemen, and the French infantry was led by the king himself at Mari-
gnano in 1 5 1 5 — did not mean that heavy cavalry ceased to be the aristocracy
of war. At the siege of Padua in 1 509 Maximilian proposed that the French
men-at-arms should dismount and storm a breach with the infantry.
The Chevalier Bayard’s reply was : ‘ Considers the emperor it to be a just
and reasonable matter to peril so much nobleness together with his
infantry, of whom one is a shoe-maker, another a farrier, another a
baker, and suchlike mechanics, who hold not their honour as do we
gentlemen?’ A proposal that French and German men-at-arms should
fight dismounted but together produced an extension of this point of
view. The Germans refused on the score that ‘ they were not such as went

31 285 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

on foot, nor to go into a breach, their true estate being to fight like gentle-
men on horseback’. 1

Mounted on strong barded horses, armed with lance and axe or mace,
the unvarying tactic of such heavy cavalry was a furious charge in bodies
of from 400 to 500. The basic unit in the organisation was the lance,
consisting of a man-at-arms and his entourage, varying in number from
country to country. In France he was supported by an esquire, page
and servant, and maintained two crossbowmen, all mounted, and on
occasion charging together. As with the infantry there was a tendency
for the heavy part of the unit, the man-at-arms and his supporters, to
become separated from the lighter horsed bowmen.

The obvious usefulness of light horse in foraging and raiding aided
this split, and it was completed by the effectiveness of the Spanish light
horse and the Balkan Stradiots hired by Venice, whose mobility and
recklessness provided the republic’s main defence after the defeat of
Agnadello in 1509. Favour then was given to a cavalry riding swift
horses, armed with helmet and light body armour, sword, light lance or
crossbow — the arquebus being hard to handle. Though an almost in-
dispensable arm, however, it remained secondary to the heavy calvary,
which alone was capable of halting a column of pike. The numbers of
both declined relative to infantry, but this was in part due less to their
decreasing tactical usefulness than to the fact that for social and economic
reasons their supply was constant, while infantry could be recruited and
equipped in increasing numbers.

For transport, communication and supply, ships were an essential
complement to armies, and the fortunes of the warring Powers were
affected by the extent to which they could secure them. There were few
royal ships, little was done to establish royal navies. Just as the Swiss
and Germans were called on to make up armies, the Italian sea-states
were employed to complete fleets ; as yet the difference between warship
and merchant ship was small and both could fight together. Nor were the
functions of galley and round ship considered so disparate that they
could not be used together in both northern and southern waters, and
both Atlantic and Mediterranean Powers used intermediate types of
sail-and-oar ships.

Charles VIII had only twenty-one royal ships and two factors compli-
cated the use of merchantmen: the jealous autonomy of the respective
admirals of Brittany, Guienne and Provence, and the lack of native
shipping in the Mediterranean, where almost all trade was in foreign
hands. For the invasion of Italy, therefore, he had to hire ships from
Genoa, and though he began building galleys at Toulon, Louis XII built
royal ships at Brest, and Francis I created the port of Le Havre, France was

1 History of Bayard compiled by the Loyal Serviteur, trans. L. Larchey (London, 1883),

pp. 196-7.

286

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

never independent of hired ships and the political entanglements these
involved.

Though Spain was equally poor in royal ships, and the mounting
danger from corsairs did not revive the large-scale building of galleys
until towards the middle of the next century, she was far better off in
merchant shipping. The Crown paid a bounty on merchant tonnage and
rigidly debarred ships potentially useful in war from being sold abroad,
and Spain’s interest in Sicilian grain and trade with North Africa left her
with a large number of vessels suitable for requisitioning. Once requisi-
tioned, however, they were shoddily organised. The fleets had no unity,
poor morale. Captains undermanned in order to pocket the pay of the
‘dead souls’ they declared, and as they also carried merchandise as a
legitimate private speculation, they preferred caution to the risk of losing
it.

The fleets of Genoa suffered from the same disability. The State made
contracts with private individuals to provide ships for government service.
No compensation for damage or loss was paid, and pay was poor, so
every effort was made to avoid combat with war fleets but to capture
merchant vessels for the sake of prize money. Here, too — and it was the
same with Tuscan and papal fleets — officers were allowed cargo space.
In Venice this was true only of ships supplementing the State war-fleets,
for Venice, alone of Italian Powers, had a fleet permanently in being.
Constant threat from the Turks, whose war-fleet in 1495 numbered some
250 ships, had made this necessary, and after being caught with too few
warships by the war of 1499, a fleet of from seventy to one hundred
galleys, specially built for combat, was always available. Venice had the
additional advantage that many of her nobles had had experience of the
sea, her merchantmen were already armed, and that in her arsenal she
had the largest and most efficiently run industrial plant in Europe.

Henry VII was more interested in peaceful trade than in war. He created
the dockyard at Portsmouth with its dry dock — the first in England —
and added eight ships to the three he inherited from Richard III, but he
relied mainly on merchantmen and the bounties paid on ships of large
tonnage. His successor’s personal interest in the sea, his wish to pursue
an expansionist foreign policy, the danger from Spain, soon united with
the Netherlands, and from Scotland, who had built up a considerable fleet
during the Wars of the Roses — these reasons were to bring Henry VIII’s
navy up to eighty-five: forty-six built, twenty-six bought and thirteen
captured. To provide for them, more dockyard space was created at
Woolwich and Deptford and the administration was centralised and
made less haphazard. Admirals, for instance, were no longer responsible
for victualling and equipping their own ships. But up to 1 533 this fleet,
save in actual wartime, was still dispersed on hire to private merchants.

Guns had been mounted on ships since the early fifteenth century,

287 »i-*

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

and, as on land, the tendency during the early sixteenth was to reduce
size to make handling easier and fire more rapid, and to standardise bores
to ease the provision of ammunition. The old-fashioned breech loaders
were retained because of the speed with which they could be recharged,
but increasing use was made of better-constructed muzzle loaders, swung
inboard for re-loading on two-wheeled carriages which recoiled between
chocks in the deck. The larger ships — France, Scotland, Venice and the
Turks all had vessels of over 1000 tons, the last having two vessels of
1800 tons — carried one hundred guns or more, firing through ports in
the fore and after quarters as well as from the deck and superstructure.
The efficiency of these guns was not great. The weak powder thought safe
to use on board could hardly push a medium ball more than a mile and
with accuracy probably not more than 300 yards, but they were used
almost entirely against rigging and men, and were only a supplement to
the arms of the boarding parties. Though the best guns were hardly
less effective than those of Nelson’s day, they were not a deciding factor:
the purpose of naval tactics was as yet to get men aboard, not to sink by
gunfire.

Before their domination by broadside fire, in the middle of the century,
tactics were simple, and required no complicated evolutions. Round ships
attacked abreast, seeking the weather gauge and firing their heavy guns
at close range before boarding. If the gauge was lost, the guns were fired
to give smoke cover to an attempt to regain it. Once the ships had grappled,
the fight was a purely military affair, though small boats might be dropped
to assist generally and to bore holes at the water line. Galleys also attacked
in line abreast— even more rigidly, as their weaker construction made
fire possible only along the centre-line — and charged at the enemy’s
flanks in an attempt to break with their rams the outriggers supporting
the oars. Tactics were not specifically naval. Nearly all commanders
were military men, the proportion of soldiers to sailors aboard was 2 to 1 .
And signals were as simple as were tactics. An admiral could signal:
enemy in sight, come aboard for conference, close up, attack — but there
was nothing once battle was joined. From that moment the admiral had
no further control over the melee.

Though the temper of war was changing, becoming more calculating
and professional, chivalry still found a place. After the Hundred Years
War, writers like Jean de Bueil in Le Jouvencel tried to show that real
chivalry was no longer the concern of the individual in jousts and personal
enterprises, but in military service, where impetuosity had to be subordi-
nated to discipline while the individual could still show courage and
devotion. Though the ‘laws’ of chivalry had never applied to other than
noble classes, the increasing use of infantry still left a place for the hero,
the man furious towards the cruel, gentle towards the humble, humane
towards the poor, as his biographer described Bayard. In the storm of

288

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

actual combat there had never been wide scope for fastidious ideals of
fair play; book chivalry was seldom mirrored by battlefield chivalry.
Yet from time to time chivalric conventions still cut across scientific
warfare, over-riding tactical and strategic considerations. The complex
machinery that brought two armies face to face might still be jettisoned
by an appeal to single combat — as when Gaston de Foix challenged the
Spanish viceroy before Ravenna. Important prisoners were still released
on a noble whim — as Bayard was released without ransom by Lodovico
Sforza. Commanders by sea and land were expected to be in the van,
and lost control as a result as soon as an attack was launched. The impact
of a solid charge might be broken by individuals racing for the honour of
delivering the first blows. Rash counsel could still overcome caution,
boldness shame wisdom — as when the defenders of Rapallo disastrously
scorned to remain behind their fortifications in 1494. Quixotry might
still be put before policy — as at Fomovo, where the French were allowed
to recover from their passage of the Appenines, or Marignano, where
Francis I let the shattered Swiss go unpursued. Nor did the use of fraud
and stratagem mean that chivalry was dead. A distinction had existed at
least from the fourteenth century between ruses that were legitimate and
those that were not ; an army could wear false colours, set ambushes and
get the sun in its enemy’s eyes, for instance, but it should not break truces
or pacts. But how to decide what was allowable? By the early sixteenth
century emphasis was laid on ending wars quickly as the aim of good
men, a point of view that could soon lead a French commander to say:
‘I am of opinion that towards an Enemy all advantages are good, and
for my part (God forgive me) if I could call all the devils in Hell to beat
out the brains of an Enemy that would beat out mine, I would do it with
all my heart.’ 1

A test case in the European attitude to war is provided by the use of
gunpowder. It was only in this period that the killing power of guns was
properly appreciated; previously they had been hardly more effective
than the trebuchets and ballistas of medieval siegecraft. They had been
used, too, mainly for attacking fortifications: it was only now that the
deadly effect of cannon playing over the open field of battle was under-
stood. Renaissance Europe was confronted with what was, to all intents
and purposes, a new weapon, and one of unprecedented ferocity and de-
structive power. It was challenged on humanitarian grounds, attacked
because it was un-Christian, reviled because it enabled the base and
cowardly to strike down the noble and brave from afar. The use of gun-
powder ran counter to the teachings of the Church, and to the social code
to which the majority of influential men subscribed. In spite of this the
gun came to stay, became, indeed, ever more destructive during the period
of maximum protest; while among the protests were heard other voices

1 Montluc, ed. cit. p. 33.

289

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

that condoned, justified and admired it. The new weapon was accepted
as other new weapons had been accepted, because it appealed to man’s
inventiveness, his admiration for military efficiency, and his national
pride. The possession of large, up-to-date and powerful guns became an
important part of national prestige; idealistic arguments made no head-
way against the crucial argument: guns helped rulers to win wars. The
only Power which voluntarily crippled its military effectiveness by refusing
to exploit firearms to the utmost was an infidel one. The Mamluk ideal
of an aristocracy of horsemen led (at least until firearms could be handled
with ease from the saddle) to the restriction of handguns to specially
recruited units of black slaves, a restriction that put the Mamluk kingdom
at a serious disadvantage in her wars with the Ottoman Turk.

Against the demoralising influence of war that both the practice and
theory of popes and secular rulers in the south seemed to endorse,
Christian humanists in the north set their face. More’s Utopians scorned
the spirit of conquest, the glory of war. Erasmus wrote again and again
of the un-Christian nature of the wars of his day, their waste and brutish-
ness. Whereas most of his Adagia occupied a fraction of a column of
print, his commentary on the bitter tag Dulce Bellum Inexpertis had
grown by 1520 into a long essay. Both he and More condemned con-
ventional diplomacy as a means of settling international disputes; each
league, each marriage, each exchange of ambassadors emphasised the
split between the interests of nations, each treaty was itself a new casus
belli. And the view was shared by Erasmus’s contemporary Josse
Clicthove who declared in his De bello et pace in 1523 that he was the
citizen of no one country. ‘I recognise only the name of Christian.’

But this was not enough. Wars could not be regulated by appeals to
Christian duty. Control of war — as far as it could be controlled — came
very gradually from the efforts of lawyers to codify the usages of war,
accepting national sovereignty and appealing not to divine law but the
ius gentium. The very licence of the time provoked the remedy. Certain
aspects of war called urgently for regulation ; reprisals, privateering, the
rights of neutrals, the position of prisoners.

Their treatment was still arbitrary, and depended on the whim of in-
dividual captors, or their commander. A prisoner was the property, not
of the prince, but of the man who had captured him — though English
Articles of War enforced the payment of one-third of the profit from
prisoners to the treasurer of the wars — and if the captive were a man of
high rank his captor might sell him to a middleman who was better
placed to extort a fitting ransom. The Swiss, like the Turks, preferred
never to take prisoners and the Italian wars brought an abrupt change
in the merciful habits of the peninsula, prisoners being imprisoned, set
to forced labour, and, on occasion, tortured and blinded. It was usual
for mercy to be accorded towns that had formally capitulated, and quarter

290

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE WEST

to be granted to an enemy who was clearly defeated, but orders to this
effect were not always obeyed, and the punishment of such disobedience
in the cosmopolitan armies of the time was neither practical from a
political, nor clearly justified from a legal point of view. Indiscriminate
looting and pillaging wrought a havoc among civilians that was not to
be checked until armies were better paid, provisioned and more amenable
to discipline. From the late fourteenth century there had been isolated
attempts made to restrict looting, in order to placate the civilian popu-
lation, and to prevent armies disintegrating after a victory that might not,
after all, be final. But the only effective prohibitions concerned war material
vital to the State, notably guns and ammunition.

When the moral question of the Just War was raised at its acutest by
the cruel progress of Spanish conquest in the New World it was discussed
in terms of these practical problems, and as a result the dying sanctions
of medieval internationalism — a compound of ideas derived from the
chivalric code of what might and might not be done in time of war, the
study of civil law, and the continuing pressure of Christian morality
formalised in the canons of the Church — were slowly replaced by a body
of international law.

291

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER X

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND
LOUIS XII

I N a changing world, France, at the close of the fifteenth century,
found herself faced with problems different from those of the past.
These were to force her governments to take the necessary measures to
adapt their policy and were to have repercussions throughout society. The
Hundred Years War, whose outcome assured France of national inde-
pendence, had already freed her from threats arising from the existence
of a Flemish-Burgundian state. After the war, the kingdom, which had
been partly reconstructed in the reign of Louis XI, had to shape a course
for its policy among the new nations that were being established, to put
the State into working order at a time when its functions remained ill-
defined, to work out a definitive status for the Church, which was still
shaken by the upheavals of the Great Schism, and to restore its economy,
on which the fate of the various social classes depended.

Louis XI’s political mistakes had been offset by a sometimes incoherent
capacity for action and by almost miraculous strokes of chance. He was
succeeded by kings of feeble intellect whose enterprises were inspired
by foolish ambitions and who were bound to be mastered by the most
skilful of their rivals. Except in rare cases, moreover, there was no
statesman at the French court capable of taking over the reins of govern-
ment. Such were the conditions under which French policy, already
jeopardised by the mistakes made by Louis XI, was about to move in a
direction which influenced the future of Europe for years to come.

In the early years of Charles VIII’s reign, although the king had legally
come of age, government was in fact in the hands of his sister and her
husband, Pierre de Beaujeu. Anne was like her father in some characteris-
tics. She was responsible and diligent in studying state affairs, and earned
from him the name of ‘the least foolish woman in the world’. During
those early years, a period of unrest among the aristocracy and among the
people, the government felt the effects of her vigorous and far-sighted
guidance. It is true that these good qualities were counterbalanced by
short-sighted selfishness : her boundless greed and constant awareness of
her own interests were later to bring the Bourbon-Beaujeu family and her
son-in-law, the constable, into conflict with the interests of the king of
France. But now, after seven years of tutelage, which he had borne with
impatience, Charles VIII was about to exercise his authority for himself.

If we are to judge him according to the almost unanimous estimates of
his contemporaries, he brought but indifferent abilities to his task. ‘In

292

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

body as in mind, he is of no great value’, said Contarini; and Commynes
bore out this opinion in describing him as ‘very young, weakly, wilful,
rarely in the company of wise men ’, and he added that ‘ he was endowed
with neither money nor sense He had received very little education and
was unable to understand Latin. His only appreciation was for ‘moral
and historical’ works, and above all for the romances of chivalry which
provided food for his imagination. He could sign his letters only with
difficulty and was unable to write them himself; he took little interest
in government affairs, and handed them over to advisers of no great
ability who did not dissuade him even from his most hasty enterprises.
Yet his intentions were good and he was anxious ‘to lead a good life
according to the commandments of God and to put the church and the
administration of justice in order’. And indeed, immediately after the
Italian expedition, he seemed desirous of bending himself to this task,
when death cut short a reign for which some could foresee a glorious
ending.

Charles VIII, whose degenerate children had been destined to die
young, was succeeded by his cousin, Louis of Orleans, who, after a dis-
turbing youth spent in the camp of the king’s enemies, had grown wiser
as with advancing years he drew nearer to the throne. He, too, was not
very intelligent: he had a small head ‘in which there was not room for
much brain’; but he charmed his contemporaries with a certain warlike
gallantry and provided matter for his eulogists by uttering words that
bore the stamp of good will and wisdom. He reassured his subjects by
giving evidence of a concern for economy, a desire to be compassionate
towards the common people, to be fair in administering justice and to
be wise ‘in the manner of Moses’. All this might well delude readily-
admiring courtiers, the notables of the 1506 Assembly who proclaimed
him to be the ‘Father of the people’, and the hired writers who extolled
his virtues. The truth must not escape us on that account : Louis XII was
an overbearing king, and he undertook costly ventures which, conducted
as they were, without foresight, ended in disaster. Besides, the members
of his court did him no good service. His queens did not contribute to
his popularity. His first marriage, to Jeanne de France, the daughter of
Louis XI, who was very much out of favour, ended in divorce. The
scandal created by this was intensified by the fact that an immoral and
disreputable pope took part in it. A second marriage, with Anne of
Brittany, brought the widow of Charles VIII back to the throne. She
had shunned the limelight during her first reign, but afterwards grew
bolder and intervened in government affairs, seeking the advantage of
her Breton interests to the prejudice of those of the kingdom. Apart
from a few favourites who never rose above mediocrity, the governing
power was Georges d’Amboise, archbishop of Rouen, cardinal and papal
legate. For ten years he enjoyed almost sovereign authority, directing

293

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

Italian policy and dictating to the Church in France, which he wished to
reorganise within the framework of a national church. ‘ Ipse est vere rex
Franciae’, said a contemporary; but he, too, was a king who thought
primarily of his own ambitions.

These two reigns, however lacking they were in men of genius and
lasting achievements, left a favourable impression, because the nobility
accomplished a few glorious exploits and the people recovered from the
calamities of the previous century. There were no more devastating wars,
no more famine, no more widespread and fatal epidemics; agriculture
and trade prospered greatly. This was more than was needed to excite
public opinion in the interval between two periods of poverty. Relations
with Italy and the beginnings of the French Renaissance consummated the
enthusiasm of scholars whose view of the period has prevailed ever since.

The heads of the French State were to decide on their policy in a Europe
transformed by the disappearance of the medieval Empire and of the
Papacy considered as a universal power. Louis XI had long been
threatened by the appanaged princes, particularly by the duke of Burgundy,
the most powerful of them; he had got the better of them in 1477
and in 1482 the Treaty of Arras left him with the greater part of
the Burgundian patrimony. But there were still rivalries, and, as a
consequence of the marriage of Maximilian of Habsburg to Mary of
Burgundy, the heiress of Charles the Bold, the problems of French policy
were linked to those of European politics. In the absence of an emperor
seeking to impose his ‘monarchy’ on the Christian world, the heads of
the neighbouring states would intervene in the feudal domains of France,
thus threatening the territorial integrity of the kingdom. Two outstanding
problems had to be solved, one concerning the provinces of Burgundy,
and the other, Brittany. At this juncture, Maximilian and the king of
England might be expected to intervene in both.

The Treaty of Arras had for the time being settled the question of the
Burgundian inheritance and the fate of the unreliable provinces which
tried to work out their destiny by remaining uncommitted to either France
or the Empire. The uninterrupted development of their economic activity
made them a tempting prey for neighbouring states. France had received
Artois, Franche-Comte, Charolais and the county of Auxerre, but these
made up the dowry of Margaret of Austria, then only two years old, who
was to marry Charles VIII. This pacification was precarious and dependent
on an event in the distant future, and it did not put an end to claims on
these provinces from many quarters.

At the beginning of the reign, Brittany presented the most important
question. The aristocratic reaction which made itself felt after the hard
years of the reign of Louis XI was threatening to build up against the
government a coalition grouped round Francis II, the duke of Brittany,
who found support throughout society, all classes being equally ill-treated

294

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

and discontented. The princes also relied on being allied to Maximilian
of Austria and the king of England, Richard III, both of whom were
prepared to commit themselves against the king of France. The threat
was all the more serious because Francis II, who was no longer young,
had no sons, and the fate of his province would depend on the marriage
of Anne, his eldest daughter. The king had to resort to precautionary
measures to prevent a hostile Power from taking up a position in this
duchy, for it was deeply devoted to its independence and threatened the
rear of the king’s forces, whose attention was directed rather to the areas
of the Scheldt and the Meuse. After the failure of a first coalition — the
Guerre Folle — a new rising broke out in 1487-8, supported by contingents
sent by Maximilian and the king of England. The royal army brought
it to an end by its victory at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier (1488), and the
Treaty of Sabl6 enforced a solution that was satisfactory to the kingdom
of France: foreign troops were to evacuate Brittany, and Anne was not
to marry without the king’s consent. And the possibility of this was now
nearer because of the death of Duke Francis II and the accession of his
daughter, who was then twelve years old, as duchess. The process of
pacification, which seemed likely to be permanent, was further delayed
by the resistance of the Breton nobility and the intervention of those
princes who wished to marry the duchess. It was Maximilian who was
successful, and the marriage took place, though only by proxy. The result
was a most serious international dispute, and one likely to threaten the
independence of the French kingdom (1490). It was this that was at
stake in a new conflict. This time, it was Charles VIII who wanted to
marry Anne of Brittany and he made ready to win her by force of arms.
Victory for France led to the Treaty of Laval, in which Anne consented
to marry her new suitor provided that he undertook to respect the
autonomy of Brittany.

Having overcome the danger to which she was subject from Burgundy,
France was freed from the threat from Brittany and, at the same time, the
feudal lords, deprived of their principal leaders, inspired less apprehension.
Abroad, the Emperor Maximilian, despite his claims on the Burgundian
inheritance, was powerless to reopen the quarrel, and Henry VII, the
king of England, while still demanding the French Crown, seemed to be
unable to start afresh the hostilities which had been discontinued for
forty years. French policy, freed from all immediate anxiety, was
enjoying one of those rare periods of equilibrium when nothing compelled
her either to take sides or to meet any enemy. But the coast was also
clear for all the vagaries into which their imagination tempted the king
and his advisers.

It was then that Charles VIII, carried away by his chivalric enthusiasm,
undertook the Neapolitan expedition. He was thinking of reviving the
rights of the dukes of Anjou to the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, questionable

295

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

rights arising out of an occupation which had taken place in the remote
past and had always been shaky. But he was urged to do this by entreaties
from Italy — from Lodovico il Moro, duke of Milan. Beyond Naples,
the king had visions of the conquest of Jerusalem and the crusade, and
the restoration of the Christian empire at Constantinople, in the absence
of the title of Roman Emperor which was no longer open for competition.
These projects of wild adventure, these ‘ vanities and glories of Italy ’, as
Commynes called them, were to put French policy out of true for more
than half a century and use up her strength and wealth with no result save
that of becoming the pawn of the governments of Italy. We should not,
however, condemn this policy without taking into account the real
interests which drew France in this new direction. Up to the time that
the attraction of the New World was felt, trade with the East, the strategic
points occupied on the shores of the Mediterranean, and the use of harbours
which the annexation of Provence had incorporated into the kingdom had
all deserved to hold the attention of statesmen and to encourage them to
try to establish a strong position in the Mediterranean basin. They could
not foresee that countries hitherto deprived of such advantages were to
find other trade routes opening up and other sources of wealth within
their reach.

From the beginning, the Neapolitan expedition entailed for France
sacrifices which reduced her recent gains to nothing. On his own initiative,
Charles VIII bought a promise of perpetual peace from England on pay-
ment of heavy indemnity (Treaty of Staples); better still, he restored
Roussillon and Cerdagne to Ferdinand of Aragon (Treaty of Barcelona),
and Franche-Comte, Artois and Charolais to Maximilian, whose daughter
was returned to him at the same time, since her projected marriage could
not take place (Treaty of Senlis). France gave up without compensation
the greater part of what she had gained from the Burgundian inheritance.
The result was that her north-eastern frontier was in jeopardy for two
centuries. Things being thus settled, Charles VIII could set out on his
conquest of Naples — a short-lived one, for he was driven out by the
Italian Powers in coalition and escaped, thanks to the drawn battle of
Fomovo.

But the consequences of this conquest were not short-lived: the Powers
who had an interest in the fate of Italy and the Mediterranean were to
form a league against France; the answer to Charles VIII’s expedition
was the marriage of the Archduke Philip to Joanna of Spain, heiress to
Aragon and Castile (1495). In this way, as a retort to Charles VIII, the
union of the Habsburgs with the Spanish dynasty was being prepared,
together with the immense power to be enjoyed by Charles V, which
France would regard as a threat to her existence. Charles VIII was not
disheartened by this setback and prospect: he was thinking of going to
war again in order to make sure of Italy, when he died in 1498.

296

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

His successor, Louis XII, was no more far-sighted when he threw
himself into similar ventures, with even greater ambitions, because of his
claim to Milanese territory which he demanded as a descendant of the
Viscontis. For half a century, the duchy of Milan was to be the cause of
bitter rivalry between the Valois and the Habsburgs, being controlled
first by one, then by the other, in the midst of fruitless wars and negotia-
tions. Beyond Milan, French ambitions turned towards Naples, on which
Spain also had designs ; but there more than elsewhere, France was badly
placed, as much by her geographical remoteness as by the weakness of
her maritime forces compared with those of Ferdinand of Aragon and
his successors, who were masters of the western half of the Mediterranean.
France did not realise that the making of a great bid for sea-power was
an indispensable condition for any policy of expansion in the maritime
areas of the Levant.

French ambitions caused uneasiness even to the papal government.
Although, by placing his forces at the disposal of Cesare Borgia, he suc-
ceeded in coming to an agreement with Alexander VI, Louis XII now had
to deal with a far more formidable adversary in the person of Julius II,
who was impatient of any curtailment of his independence. Having
shown his tractability by being party to the League of Cambrai, which
was directed against Venice, Louis XII saw a new league being formed
against him, intended this time to drive the French out of Italy (1512).
The situation was complicated by religious quarrels, by Gallicanism and
plans for ecclesiastical reform. The military talents of Gaston de Foix
and the victory at Ravenna did not produce the decisive results that
might have been expected. By the end of 1512 the last signs of French
rule had disappeared, and Milan had passed once more into the hands of
the Sforzas. In 1513 another attempt to bring off a conquest ended in
defeat at Novara, while the kingdom was invaded from all sides. Henry VII
of England attacked the northern frontiers, thus showing the resurgence
of English ambitions : as far as they were concerned, the Hundred Years
War was not finally over. The Swiss advanced as far as Dijon and their
retreat had to be dearly bought. The pope threatened to lay France under
an interdict, and she had to yield to the demands of her enemies. When
Louis XII died, the wise course for the new government would have been
to minimise the consequences of all the battles that had been so rashly
joined.

The extension of political activity, and the reorganisation of the State
which was taking place during the same period in every country in
western Europe, were characterised in France by the changes in her
institutions which prepared the way for the administrative monarchy of
modem times. From this point of view, the second half of the fifteenth
century was rich in achievement.

297

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

In the feudal monarchy of the preceding centuries, authority rested on
personal relationships and the performance of feudal services, and the
power of the king varied from province to province and was purely
nominal in the domains of the great feudal lords. In place of these arrange-
ments, as a consequence of the ordeals of the Hundred Years War and
the need for recovery after a period of anarchy. State administration and
public services were to be substituted. The army, finance and the admini-
stration of justice were to be subject to rudimentary organisation under
the supreme authority of the Conseil du roi and in the hands of a body of
legal experts who were entirely devoted to the sovereign. These institutions
were naturally not conceived according to very well-defined principles,
nor were they very methodically brought into being. Neither Charles VIII
nor Louis XII had any great gifts for government, and their courts
contained more grasping rivals than statesmen. For all that, it is evident
that a few reforms were effected during these reigns and some practices
were adopted which, taken together, heralded the appearance of a new
system.

At that time, a great change took place, a change which may be
regarded as a transformation of the monarchical system itself. For more
than a century the Estates General had met so frequently that they had
become an essential organ of the monarchy: it was recognised that they
had the right to authorise taxation and to nominate members of the
Conseil du roi and, if the king was a minor, the regent. Government
seemed, at times, to be evolving towards a parliamentary system modelled
on that of England. The Estates General, meeting in 1484 in order to
organise Charles VIII’s government, appeared to be continuing this
tradition. But matters subsequently turned out otherwise. Once his
power was consolidated, the king shook off all forms of supervision and
the Estates General were no longer summoned. Henceforward they were
only occasional assemblies, whose powers were not clearly defined, and
their advice was sought only in cases of extreme uncertainty.

The most permanent organ of government and the centre of the king’s
administration was now the Conseil du roi in which sat the great officers
of the Crown, who were at the head of the chief administrative services.
These were crucial years in the formation of the administrative framework
of the monarchy of the ancien regime. From then on, the chancellerie
and the surintendance des finances , with their staffs oigeneraux des finances
and tresoriers de France, had a certain permanence which was ensured by
tradition and sometimes by documents such as the great ordinance of
reform of 1499. At the same time, these staffs were completed by the
enrolment of new administrators of humbler extraction : they were less
likely to change than the men of high rank who were at the mercy of
court factions. In particular, these new administrators were the secretaires
signant en finances : these were given special tasks according to their

298

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

In this way, the organisation of central government was being settled
during the period of peace following the turmoil of the wars with England.
The system seemed to be moving towards marked centralisation, but that
did not exclude certain centrifugal tendencies. The kingdom was too
extensive and the newly assimilated feudal states were still too autonomous
to allow this centralisation to be complete or permanent. In place of the
Estates General that were falling into abeyance, provincial estates were
being organised; side by side with the supreme courts, which sat at the
Palais de la citi, in Paris, others were being set up in the provinces with
supreme powers which rendered appeals to the Paris Parlement un-
necessary. This movement had begun in earlier reigns with the Parlements
of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Grenoble, but during the reign of Louis XII
the existence of those of Rouen, Dijon and Aix was ratified, while at
Rennes a similar organisation was being initiated for the duchy of Brittany,
which had some direct links with the Crown. At the same time, the king-
dom was divided into four great financial districts, known as the generalites.
These were the generalites of Languedoil, Languedoc, Normandy and
Outre-Seine-et-Yonne, and to them the newly assimilated provinces of
Picardy, Burgundy, Dauphine, Provence, Brittany and Guyenne were
soon added. This arrangement, which had been dictated by historical
necessity, was destined to be reorganised in such a way as to become more
homogeneous and more easily supervised by the central administration.
But this improvisation foreshadowed reforms that were to be made later
in financial administration. If we enter into the details of provincial
organisation, we see that other changes were heralding the approach of
modem times. While the towns had for several centuries been endowed
with councils and genuine constitutions guaranteed by charters, the
villages were now tending to organise themselves into communaut^s
d'habitants. In order to facilitate the apportionment and collection of
the taille, more and more villages held meetings and set up a rudimentary
form of municipal administration. In addition, a few privileges of franchise
were being granted, especially in connection with the administration of
justice. These were the earliest developments of local powers which were
subsequently to become more active.

The same tendency could be observed in legislative matters. The kings,

299

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

wishing to overhaul and unify the code of law which prevailed in the
kingdom, undertook in the first place to record in writing local customs
which were for the most part handed down orally and through tradition.
The 1454 meeting of the Estates General had ordained that all provinces
of the kingdom subject to customary law should carry out this work, and
the task of recording and revising was one of the jurists’ chief occupations
in the reigns of Charles VIII and Louis XII. It was evident that later the
systems would need to be co-ordinated, thus creating a uniform code of
law throughout the kingdom ; but this project was never completed. The
consequence was that, here again, differences prevailed, and, at the same
time, the various traditions of customary law were strengthened.

In this way, the system which was to be peculiar to the government
of the realm up to the end of the ancien regime was being created — a
centralised system which yet allowed of regional autonomy.

Two novel instruments, which were firmly established during these
two reigns, were now at the disposal of the Crown : finance and the army.
In both cases, Charles VII’s ordinances had laid down the broad principles.
Butfrom these tentative beginnings, a system of specific rules was developed
which placed two indispensable tools in the hands of the sovereign.

The ordinary revenue, coming from the royal domain, was no longer
sufficient to supply the ever-growing needs of the State. In addition,
various other sources had been tapped. At first, they had been regarded
as available only in special circumstances, but they subsequently provided
the royal treasury with its most stable and easily collected income. Of these,
the faille yielded the highest sums and it was the most readily available
to the king. It was a direct tax, levied annually, and had originally to be
granted by the Estates General, who also decided on the total amount to
be raised. At their meeting in 1484 they had reaffirmed this principle, but,
from the end of the reign of Charles VII, there was no longer any need
for them to intervene, and the total sum was fixed annually by the Conseil
du roi on the basis of anticipated expenditure. Louis XI had raised the
faille to the exorbitant figure of 3,400,000 livres; after his reign, the govern-
ment had to restrain its demands so as not to rouse the Estates General
of 1484 to opposition. The rate was, therefore, reduced by more than
half, and the new figure fluctuated very little despite expenditure arising
out of the Italian wars. But this restraint was made possible only because
it was counterbalanced by a system of loans, of mortgages on the royal
domain and of other financial expedients, so that at the end of his reign
Louis XII, despite his reputation for economy, was compelled to raise
the rate of direct taxation, which eventually exceeded the rate imposed
by Louis XI. This organisation of the finances, brought to perfection at
the end of the fifteenth century, put at the king’s disposal an extremely
flexible fiscal system and resources on which later kings drew in large
measure when placed in difficult circumstances. These resources were

300

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

primarily devoted to the upkeep of the royal army, in which paid soldiers
were replacing once and for all the contingents that had been provided as
part of feudal dues. The compagnies d'ordonnance, raised under Charles VII,
made up the chief component of the armies which fought in Italy. These
heavily-armed companies of cavalry were made up almost entirely of
noblemen. Louis XII added to them an artillery force which was both
powerful and mobile and could be transported across the Alps to Italy.
This costly achievement contributed largely to the success of the royal
armies on the battlefield. They were victorious in the Italian expeditions
until the whole military system had to be remodelled as a result of the
use of portable firearms, the transformation of defence procedure and
the introduction of new tactical methods.

At the same time, a new service was making its appearance in the
royal administration. This was the diplomatic service, which had first
been tried out by Louis XI in imitation of Italian governments. Since
1484 it had become customary for the king to be represented at Rome
by a cardinal in permanent residence, and embassies extraordinary
negotiating with foreign governments grew in number. From the beginning
of the sixteenth century the Italian wars and relations with Switzerland
were to extend this diplomatic activity, and in later reigns it would be put
on an organised footing.

It is in the reigns of Charles VIII and Louis XII that we must seek the
origin of the administrative and doctrinal changes which were a feature
of the religious history of France for several centuries. The last of the
disturbances caused by the Great Schism were still being felt in a Church
that was seeking to regain its balance, and the endeavours of reformers
wishing to restore dogma and discipline could be observed.

The religious crisis, which had thrown Christendom into confusion for
more than a century and in which conciliar authority was at odds with
that of the pope, had appeared in France in the form of Gallicanism.
This movement, faithful to conciliar doctrine, accorded to the pope only
an honorific primacy. Within the French kingdom, the Church was to be
administered as a national unit and governed according to its particular
customs and the decisions of its own councils under the direction of its
bishops. The pope was deprived of all jurisdiction, and at the same time
the levying of tithes and collection of annates and other dues extracted by
the Pontifical Chamber when benefices were conferred were forbidden.
Gallicanism, which had been inspired by certain renowned theologians
of the fifteenth century, was not a doctrine which had been defined
once and for all. Among its supporters, there were obvious differences
corresponding to the particular interests actuating the various groups.
Gallicanism amongthe clergy, being more absolute, was different from that
of the king — the latter tending above all to safeguard the rights of the

22 301 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

monarch — and also from that of the Parlement, that is of the lawyers,
who primarily showed respect for juridical principles.

In 1438 the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had, without the pope’s
agreement, fixed the status of the Church of France. It had stipulated
that benefices should be filled by free election or by the patrons designated
to grant them, and that papal taxes should be abolished, together with
appeals to the court of Rome in ecclesiastical actions. This enactment
was condemned by the popes who had endeavoured, since the end of the
Great Schism, to restore their own absolutism. Meanwhile, the kings,
drawn this way and that by opposing political motives, hesitated between
applying the Sanction and rescinding it. Louis XI, who was particularly
fickle, had abolished it when he wished to make use of the pope, only to
resuscitate it in the form of ordinances of Gallican inspiration when he
was at loggerheads with Rome. Charles VIII’s government was equally
changeable. In 1484 the Estates General demanded that the Pragmatic
Sanction be restored, but shortly afterwards there was more talk of
negotiating with the pope for a concordat.

T hi s policy of shifts and delays might have gone on quietly for a long
time had the Italian wars not brought fresh fuel to the quarrel. In the
belief that he was strengthening his position there, Charles VIII presented
himself in Italy as a reformer of the Church. Opposing the Papacy, which
had been discredited by the scandals of Alexander Vi’s court, he let it be
said that he intended to depose the pope, and he held before him the
threat of a general council. At Tours, in 1493, he had called together a
commission which was to prepare a programme of reform; and his depar-
ture for Italy assumed the character of a crusade against both the Turks
and Rome. But these fruitless projects faded at the very moment he was
in a position to realise them : he swore an oath of allegiance to Alexander VI
who soon made game of him by refusing to invest him with the kingdom
of Naples.

As for Louis XII, he made use of Gallicanism as though it were a means
of striking at the Papacy. This he did in view of the perplexities of Italian
politics, in which Pope Julius II led every coalition directed against
France. To considerations of ecclesiastical discipline were added the
personal ambitions of Cardinal d’Amboise, who was constantly playing
a part parallel to the king’s. The cardinal, who was always helping
himself to benefices, was assisted by a large and insatiable family. His
ambitions turned towards Italy, and he was the chief architect of Louis XII’s
enterprises in that country. He had visions of putting the crowning
touch to these by becoming pope himself. When he was disappointed in
this ambition, he wanted at least to strengthen his hold over the Church
in France by setting up a national church over which he would have ruled
with all the powers of a pope. This system came into being with the legatine
bull which made Georges d’Amboise the pope’s representative with

302

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

unlimited powers to carry out the reform of the Church in France (1501).
This arrangement might spread alarmingly and jeopardise the unity of the
Church ; and it foreshadowed the eventual constitution of the Church of
England. Moreover, it disturbed real Gallicans, for they saw in it not the
restoration of traditional liberties but the threat of subjection to the king
in place of subjection to the pope.

The development of this policy brought about a violent conflict which
Louis XII did not scruple to kindle in the last years of his reign, with the
collaboration of Cardinals Brigonnet and de Prie. As a reply to threats
from Julius II, Louis XII called an assembly of jurists at Lyons in 1510:
they were to draw up a judicial ordinance, based on Gallican principles,
to effect a partial revival of the Pragmatic Sanction. Shortly afterwards,
an assembly of clergy meeting at Tours asserted that the king had the
right to defend his kingdom in any circumstances and to appeal to a
council to suspend the necessity for submission to the pope. As the
conflict became more serious, Louis XII, with the support of a small
group of cardinals, wished to try his luck with an ecumenical council
which was summoned in 1511 by a decree issued by the dissenting
cardinals. The council opened at Pisa, attended by very few participants,
most of whom were French. This deprived the council of its universality.
Its meetings had scarcely begun when it had to escape to safety at Milan,
then at Lyons, where it broke up after making a few gestures inspired by
traditional conciliar doctrines. This failure was due both to military
reverses in Italy and to Julius II’s counter-offensive: at the same time as
the council of Pisa, the pope had convened a papal council whose
authority was immediately acknowledged by most Christian states (1512).

This conciliar policy, whose aim was to reform canon law and Church
discipline, ran the risk of being misunderstood by the mass of the people.
The government wished, therefore, to play upon public opinion through
juridical and literary propaganda which would penetrate every section of
society. Writers addressed every kind of reader. Jean Lemaire de Beiges
published an historical treatise entitled La difference des schismes et des
conciles, in which he gave a tendentious view of the history of the popes.
Jean Bouchet wrote the Deploration de VEglise militante. Pierre Gringore
addressed the common people in a broad farce with the title La chasse
du cerf des cerfs and in Le jeu du Prince des sots which portrayed Church
and pope surrounded by personifications of the vices. Jurists and canonists
influenced the educated public by republishing the text of the Pragmatic
Sanction together with legal commentaries by Cosme Guymier, buttressing
it up with all the arguments of Gallicanism. M. Bertrand, of Toulouse,
published a Tractatus de bello inter summum pontificem . . . , and Jacques
Almain, one of the theologians of the Sorbonne, wrote innumerable
dogmatic treatises — Exposition de la puissance ecclesiastique, De dominio
naturali, De auctoritate Ecclesiae. These were replies to those who defended

303 •»-»

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

the absolutism of the pope and to Thomas de Vio (Cajetan, the Dominican
general) whose treatises were submitted to the faculty of theology with
instructions to censure them. These polemics roused the passions of the
opposing parties.

Such polemics were none the less relatively mild, though they were
often couched in violent language — for religious feeling was too strong
for the polemists not to wish to exercise some discretion. The king realised
that his subjects desired peace, and, after the failure of his Gallican
council, he saw, as a result of fresh military disasters, that he must come
to an understanding with his enemies. The Lateran Council had con-
demned the ‘council’ of Pisa. A papal bull had anathematised the French
kingdom, thus making it liable to be laid under an interdict. Louis XII
was rendered powerless by repeated failures and had to give in; and the
death of Julius II now facilitated the making of peace. When the cardinals
who had promoted the schismatic council had become reconciled with
the new pope, the king threw in his lot with the Lateran Council and sent
a solemn embassy to it. All this was to bring the conflict over Gallicanism
to an end. But the council had instituted proceedings against the Prag-
matic Sanction and the king’s government was summoned to appear in
order to prove its innocence. In 1515 Francis I found himself compelled
to negotiate a compromise, unless military success made it possible for
him to reopen the controversy and impose his will.

This long period of militant Gallicanism had sorely tried the Church
in France. Far from finding protection in the Pragmatic Sanction, it had
been subjected to arbitrary interference from popes and kings alike. The
rules laid down by the Sanction for the conferment of benefices had never
been observed. For consistorial benefices (bishoprics and abbeys) elections
were ordained and responsibility for the selection of prelates was handed
over to the chapters of canons or monks of the appropriate order. But
the kings had compelled acceptance of their candidates, either by com-
mending them to the electors, or by getting them elected through resorting
to intimidation or violence. This was so in every feudal domain in which
princes attempted to secure appointments for their favourites. The electors
were more or less submissively resigned to accepting the sovereign’s
creatures; if they did resist, there were endless legal actions between the
canonically elected candidate and his rival. Such actions resulted in a
loss of reputation for both candidates and kept anarchy alive in the
dioceses. In the reigns of Charles VIII and Louis XII, fifty-five episcopal
sees came under dispute in this way within the province of the Paris
Parlement alone. The Pragmatic Sanction had laid down equally strict
rules for minor benefices — curacies, canonries and chaplaincies. The
customary patrons of these were also stripped of their powers, either by
the pope at times when the king was trying to come to an agreement with
him, or by the king himself, who made improper use of his regalian right.

304

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

In this way, all orderliness had disappeared from the life of the French
Church. Those who opposed it wrongly blamed the Pragmatic Sanction
for this decline, for these irregularities had their origin precisely in
infringements of its instructions. Episcopal sees and abbeys were set
aside for members of great families and for dignitaries of the State who
wished to find a lucrative career without having to give up their secular
activities. Some families, who were more particularly devoted to the
Church, monopolised provincial benefices which seemed to be set apart
for them. Such were the Bri?onnets, the Salazars, the Ponchers ; such also
the d’Amboise family, whose members at one time occupied simultaneously
five dioceses and several abbeys. Moreover, since the most lucrative
benefices did not satisfy them, they did not scruple to indulge in pluralism,
contrary to all canonical rules concerning incompatible benefices. And
wealthy holders of benefices arranged among themselves barter and
exchanges together with settlements of incomes, trafficking in dues paid
to ecclesiastical courts and other financial agreements, all these being so
many simoniacal practices. What is more, these dignitaries did not make
a rule of carrying out their duties. Spending their lives at court or in
their great houses, in the army or in embassies, they visited their dioceses
only to take them over or, in some cases, to be buried in their cathedrals.
Instead they delegated their powers to vicars-general and to agents ap-
pointed to collect their revenues. In monastic benefices, the procedure
was different but the results were identical, because no one imagined that
these great dignitaries could ever submit to a monastic rule: they held
their abbeys in commendam and entrusted their administration to deputies.
These worldly clergy had not lost their faith, but were imbued with a
secular spirit, and were more concerned with humanism and art than
piety. Even if they did not shock them by their dissolute morals and by
the violent conflicts between the bishops and the canons and monks who
owed them obedience, these clergy disappointed the faithful by abandoning
their traditions.

The lower clergy, all the innumerable canons, curates, chaplains and
vicars, showed the same lack of order, which persisted despite the re-
quirements of the Pragmatic Sanction. Very many of these benefices
were occupied by eminent dignitaries who used them to supplement their
income. The remainder were set apart for ecclesiastics of humbler origins,
for university graduates and law-officers, who were no more anxious
than their superiors to carry out their duties. In the end, it fell to the
general body of priests in charge to perform these duties. They were men
of no education or ecclesiastical training, ignorant of dogma and liturgy,
sometimes ignorant even of Latin and capable only of going through
rites whose inner meaning escaped them. They also lost dignity because
of the poverty in which they lived, for they were deprived of the greater
part of the normal income of their church by the titular incumbents, and

305

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

were very often reduced to living on perquisites which were not collected
without causing clashes with their parishioners. How many more of these
priests, having no incumbency, lived haphazard on alms or casual and
undependable fees?

The monasteries were afflicted with the same disease. Their revenues
were reserved to the commendatory abbot, while the monks were reduced
to such extreme poverty that some of them were brought to the point of
suing their own abbot. Buildings fell into ruin and life was no longer
ordered according to the rule. The ablest among them gave up communal
life and lived as if in private within the monasteries, while others indulged
in the most worldly pleasures, like dancing and hunting, and did not
abstain from more serious forms of dissipation. In this way, the orders
were breaking up and the wandering monk is a figure who often appears
in the society of the times.

These members of the lower clergy, whose origins were in the common
people and who shared their kind of existence, were neither more nor less
depraved than the rest of their contemporaries. But, like their superiors,
they were not distinguishable from the general body of the faithful and
had lost sight of the meaning of the religious life.

Those who were concerned to bring about a change maintained that
the Pragmatic Sanction was responsible for this decline. Later, in order
to get acceptance of the concordat, Chancellor Duprat was to assert
that it was necessary to reform the system of legislation. But in reality,
all these irregularities arose from the fact that the Pragmatic Sanction
was held in contempt and that the king and higher clergy interfered illegally
in Church affairs. So ingrained indeed was habit that, even when the
concordat was in force, morals were unchanged and irregularities grew
more serious.

However, with the appearance of certain personages who visibly
exerted their influence in the times of Charles VIII and Louis XII, there
were signs that a change for the better might take place. The so-called
rigoristes did their utmost to bring about a return to order and to obser-
vance of canonical rules, to restore monastic discipline and the study of
theological subjects, and to encourage among the clergy the tradition of
mysticism which had gone on uninterrupted in the fifteenth century in
Flanders and the Rhineland. Some attempts at reformation had been
made during earlier reigns: certain abbots had striven to regain proper
control over the Benedictine monasteries and the mendicant orders. But
these reforms gave rise to quarrels in which every institution tried to
maintain its independence. This spirit of reform also inspired the Estates
General of 1484, which resulted in the Synod of Sens (1485) and the
assembly of clergy at Tours (1493) publishing decrees of reform. These
ordained that discipline should be restored and were in fact a mere
reminder of the requirements laid down by the Pragmatic Sanction.

306

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

Charles VIII and after him Louis XII were prompted by good intentions,
as was also Cardinal d’Amboise who had control over all the clergy in
the kingdom. But the temptation to make use of the Church and her
riches for purely temporal ends was too strong, and only a few individual
reformers were able to take up the work of restoration. The most famous
of these reformers were the Franciscan preacher Olivier Maillard, the
hermit Saint Francis of Paola, who founded the order of Minims, and
Jean de Rely, bishop of Angers. At the same time, a mystic from the
Low Countries, Jean Standonck, who was filled with a desire for asceticism
and also with eagerness to apply the canonical rules to the letter, re-
established the Congregation of Montaigu and enforced the discipline
with relentless rigour. Jean Mombaer, who also came from the Low Coun-
tries, reformed the monasteries of Chateau-Landon and Saint-Victor.
All these were supported by the judicial authorities, for their reforms
sometimes necessitated the use of force. This made these undertakings
dangerous and hardly compatible with the religious spirit which should
have inspired the clergy.

A renewal of Christian thought was no less indispensable as a result of
the decline in university studies, for these were bogged down in scholastic
philosophy and the study of commentaries through which they were losing
sight of the thought of the great writers of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
On the model of the Italian Renaissance, there was taking shape a move-
ment in which great attention was paid both to ancient philosophy and
to the text of the scriptures, with the intention of restoring these writings
to their original form and of fathoming the thought of their authors.

The founder of this movement was Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, who was
active during the half-century before the French Reformation came to
light. The centre of his activity was the college of Cardinal Lemoine where
he taught and attracted all those who, lik e himself, were concentrating
on a study of the scriptures. Lefevre had been trained on the methods
of the Italian humanists with which he combined the mystical thought of
the Rhineland. He began his career with a study of Aristotle, and had
published an edition of his works. But he mistrusted the philosophy of
the ancients and soon came to regard it only as a stepping stone towards
Christian thought. So he turned to a study of the Scriptures, considering
that they should be edited according to the methods of classical scholar-
ship. His tremendous toil led up to the publication of the Psalter in
1509; this included a commentary to elucidate the literal meaning and a
mystical interpretation of the text. In 1512 he published the Epistles of
Saint Paul, which concerned some of the fundamentals of Christian
dogma: they were to be interpreted by the reformers in such a way as to
provide the doctrine of justification by faith. Lefevre was satisfied with
a very simple commentary on the thought of Saint Paul, and did not
broach the disconcerting questions of salvation, grace and predestination.

307

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

The work of Lefevre, whose career had been eminently successful, opened
up new vistas of theological interference with traditional dogma.
His work was still imbued with medieval mysticism and respected
established practices, but it also prepared the way for the changes to be
brought about by the reformers.

Lefevre had been the first to pay due respect to humanism, and little
by little it gained esteem in all the literate sections of society, in the
monasteries and in the Paris colleges. A number of open-minded men
bent themselves also to a study of antiquity, of Greek and of the works
of the Italian humanists. Robert Gaguin and, later, Guillaume Bude
were among the foremost of those who renewed these studies. But Erasmus
was the most renowned of them : by residing more than once in Paris and
corresponding with scholarly circles, he became one of the most influential
mentors of the Parisian humanists. While the influence of Erasmus may
have been comparable to that of Lefevre, their attitudes towards morality
and traditional religion were different. There was a marked contrast
between Lefevre’s mysticism and Erasmus’s Christian wisdom and his
respect for a religious ideal which made light of formal observances and
strict conformity.

Under their two-fold influence, there appeared edition after edition
of classical texts, with commentaries inspired by increasingly precise
knowledge of the thought of the ancients. Teaching at the Sorbonne and
the College of Navarre was revolutionised, and in this way the ‘Pre-
renaissance’ was initiated, and Paris, in the reign of Louis XII, like
Oxford and Basle and other Rhenish towns, became one of its most active
centres. It was a powerful movement and swept along the most eminent
scholars, but as yet it affected only a limited and select group. The
religious and intellectual outlook of the great majority still belonged to
the Middle Ages. Books of popular piety, devotion to images and relics,
pilgrimages, and an acute sense of suffering and death maintained in
men’s minds a formalism which was expressed in religious art by the
themes of the Crucifixion, the Entombment and the Dance of Death.

The common people, who remained outside the stream of the intellec-
tual revival, were still primarily concerned with the material anxieties of
their corporate life and their daily bread. In this sphere, too, the reigns of
Charles VIII and Louis XII are a period apart, rich in new beginnings.
The Hundred Years War had brought in its train disasters comparable
to those of the harshest epochs of the early Middle Ages. Depopulation and
ruin of the countryside, and economic crisis aggravated by epidemics
had even affected the towns. Since the middle of the fifteenth century,
recovery had been difficult, and the looting carried on by troops and the
wars of the reign of Louis XI had prevented the appearance of any move-
ment of revival.

308

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

When Charles VIII came to the throne, the decline in population was
still very marked. In the provinces most seriously affected, the country-
side was deserted : their inhabitants had been annihilated or had left them
for districts where there was less danger. Many documents refer to
villages that were abandoned never to be occupied again. Much land had
become a wilderness once more : forest and scrub had invaded the arable
ground, and some stretches of country which became waste were not to
be cultivated again until the nineteenth century. The boundaries of the
domains themselves had disappeared and properties got badly con-
fused. Feudal dues and the revenue accruing from the ownership of
land had disappeared with the boundaries within which their collection
was authorised. It was not uncommon to find that people no longer
knew to which lord a particular estate belonged, so that the very foundations
of the feudal system, which had been worked out in such minute detail
before, were shaken. And this state of affairs was not limited to a few
isolated districts. On the contrary, it was the fate of those areas which,
in the past, had been most prosperous: the Ile-de-France, Normandy and
Gascony, which suffered particularly from soldiers’ looting, were be-
coming a wilderness once more. Even the towns were not spared these
disasters. There was no reconstruction of buildings that fell into ruin,
and, although the peasantry took refuge in them, all witnesses testify
that their population was small and labour expensive.

There were to be increasing efforts towards recovery for more than
half a century, during which domestic peace remained undisturbed after
the end of the Italian wars and fiscal exactions were less severe. At the
same time, a series of strokes of good fortune spared the country the
fatal epidemics and bad weather which caused widespread famine. The
population increased and villages were slowly rebuilt during this period
of relative prosperity. At the end of the fifteenth century, people re-
appeared in the places that had been abandoned and began to till the
soil again. Often the new inhabitants came from far afield. There were
many strangers in the towns, and not a few in the country districts, and
at the same time there was much migration from one province to another.

The lords, who depended on the cultivation of their domains for their
income, tried every conceivable means of attracting new tenants. For
them, what was most important was to put the land under the plough again,
even if it involved making sacrifices. The most outstanding of these were
the emancipation of the serfs, and concessions of every kind granted to
freemen. Rather than develop their estates entirely for themselves,
which was made hazardous by the scarcity of labour, the lords preferred
to grant perpetual leases on payment of a fixed annual rent which never
exceeded four sous an arpent. This amount was insignificant even in the
currency of the time, and was to become more so later on as the value of
money depreciated. The system of tenancies with a fixed time limit, whose

309

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

terms were liable to revision, was also abandoned, and the lords, who
could claim all untenanted lands as their own, apportioned them like the
others in the hope of reconstituting their estates and attracting to them a
larger population. There were other advantages, too, such as temporary
exemption from feudal burdens, and the loan of tools and seed. The
result was that, after the close of a particularly difficult period, the
peasantry enjoyed once more a semblance of prosperity. Some of them,
indeed, who were especially favoured, achieved genuine affluence, bought
up vacant lands and built up great holdings, made up of pastures and
mixed farming. These newly-rich peasants were to go on rising in the
social scale until they took their place among the bourgeois aristocracy,
along with certain of the town-dwelling artisans and merchants. Owner-
ship of property in the hands of former tenants who now held it in
hereditary right was confirmed, but it was at the mercy of fluctuations
in the value of money and their long-term consequences.

Now, while it is clear that at the end of the fifteenth century the metallic
value of money declined as it had done almost uninterruptedly for
several centuries, it is also evident that its purchasing power increased
appreciably. The lord, who was sure of a fixed revenue from his feudal
domain, was undoubtedly adversely affected, because he received less
cash for an unchanging rent which had been stipulated in money of
account; but his receipts allowed him to buy an ever-increasing quantity
of goods, with the result that a balance was maintained and he was secure
in a certain affluence which seemed likely to subsist in the future. The
tenant, too, gained advantage from this state of affairs, because he was
protected against any arbitrary raising of his dues, and especially against
excessive exactions of the faille to be paid to his lord. And the real
agricultural prosperity of the times provided the tenant with adequate
means of livelihood. There is no doubt that in this period the welfare of
the rural population was at a standard rarely attained in our history. But
all this was to be subjected, in the first thirty years or so of the sixteenth
century, to the challenge of renewed invasion and a period of monetary
upheavals more intense than ever.

In the towns, there were similar achievements in reconstruction.
Industry and commerce were coming to life again as security returned,
and were undergoing a transformation as a result of relations being
established with new countries. Contacts with Italy brought new forms
of trade as well as commercial methods that had not been used before.
The Mediterranean countries were being opened up, as a result of the
annexation of Provence to the royal domain, and soon afterwards it was
the turn of the Atlantic coast on which maritime activity had been
growing since the discovery of the New World. The increase in population
was particularly noticeable in the towns. After Louis XI, who had called
upon foreigners to come and populate the industrial centres, the movement

310

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

became broader, particularly with the arrival of Italian artisans and
merchants. Once they had taken up permanent residence, they found
their way into all classes of French society in the sixteenth century. In
this way Lyons became an international centre, continuously inhabited by
a cosmopolitan population of Flemings, Germans from the Swiss Cantons
and the Rhineland, and above all Italians. This renewal of activity was
very marked in the traditional guilds, but brought to them at the same
time a spirit hitherto unknown.

While some aspects of medieval life were fading away, it seemed that
the life of the craft guilds was being renewed. Guilds were found only
in certain regions; they were almost unknown in the western provinces
and even in the big industrial towns like Lyons, which was still faithful
to the principle of freedom in the crafts. But they now spread, thanks
to the artisans themselves and to the authority of the king, who found
opportunities to make use of these organisations. Successive kings
greatly increased the number of guilds by issuing sets of rules for them
and ratifying the regulations governing the trades already established.
The guilds thus became public bodies, and they had a share in municipal
life and provided the constables of the watch. They could also be relied
upon to pay any exceptional taxes or to meet demands for forced loans.
It was the secret schemings of municipal policy, particularly in financial
matters, that favoured the growth of the guild system and enlisted the
kings’ active sympathy. At the same time, the spirit of the guilds was
undergoing a change: the crafts, concentrating now far more on their
professional activities, were giving up the political agitation in which
they had often indulged in earlier reigns. Domestic quarrels within the
guilds were less frequent, and disputes between masters and journeymen
less serious. This was no doubt a result of the relative stability of the
economic situation which, for a time, blunted any clash of interests.

But beneath this apparent peace, signs of disorder could be detected.
As they grew richer, masters were more and more inclined to accentuate
the differences between the journeymen and themselves. While the
masters received public honours and material rewards, together with
pre-eminence in municipal administration, the workers formed more and
more associations in the guise of brotherhoods and compagnonnages
(journeymen’s guilds). These contained seeds of a hostility that was to
result in violent conflicts and repressive measures when economic circum-
stances deteriorated. Such tendencies were even more easily discernible
in the crafts which had risen out of new techniques. Silk manufacture,
introduced from Italy, took root at Tours, where it was supplied by silk-
worms bred in the southern provinces. If one may not yet speak of large-
scale industries, there were, none the less, groups of artisans — spinners,
throwsters, weavers and dyers — who used expensive raw materials. These
necessitated the use of complicated equipment; considerable capital was

3ii

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

therefore involved, and the operatives were under the constant direction
of merchants responsible for the co-operation of individual workers
whom they provided with tools and raw materials.

The printing industry, dependent as it was on the manufacture of paper,
absorbed even more labour and capital. It had been introduced in the
reign of Louis XI and had since spread rapidly. After the first printing-
houses had been established, in Paris in 1470, and in Lyons in 1473, the
number of presses in the two cities increased greatly. These towns were
to become the chief centres of the book trade in the sixteenth century.
In Lyons there were fifty-three printing-houses at the end of the fifteenth
century and more than a hundred in 1515. A considerable number of
workers were employed, when one includes those engaged in the indis-
pensable auxiliary activities — paper-making, type-founding, illuminating,
engraving and binding. At first, these workers had come from Germany,
like the materials they used, but they were later recruited locally. Rapid
progress was made and the industry spread through every province:
in the latter years of the century, there were presses in more than thirty
towns and a very large number of books were being printed at that
time.

More than any other industry, printing called for big advances of money :
the equipment, involving the use of type and presses, was costly in itself.
The wages of the specialised workers — compositors and proof-readers —
were high, and the sum that had to be advanced for the publication of a
book exceeded the outlay necessary in any other trade, particularly as
arrangements had to be made for the distribution of books. Printers
were both booksellers and publishers and had therefore to attend fairs
and find export markets. The great printers of the period, Jodocus Badius,
the Marneffes and the Estiennes, needed to be both scholars and captains
of industry. In addition, the new industry brought other changes to the
world of labour. Printers’ journeymen, and proof-readers in particular,
often came from far afield, attracted by the important printing-houses in
the large centres. There they formed groups in which frequent disorders
made for conditions favourable to the spread of new ideas.

In the same way, trade, encouraged by more settled conditions, was
developing along lines hitherto unknown. While wars were raging, the
great trade routes had avoided France, but from now on we see her
resuming her place in international commerce. The great trading centre
was Lyons. Fairs had been established there by Charles VII in 1420, but
were held regularly and became really active only after 1489. Then,
however, they began to enjoy considerable success, for privileges were
granted to the merchants who attended them and some of these settled
permanently in the town. The great volume of business transacted there
was due to the proximity of large trading-towns in foreign countries
(Geneva and the Rhine towns) and to trade with Italy, which had increased

312

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

as a result of the wars and continued to expand up to 1567. Each of the
four annual fairs, which lasted for a fortnight, was preceded and followed
by periods of privilege and delay for the settlement of accounts. They
maintained almost constant activity in this city which, served as it was
by good navigable waterways, was a halting-place on the routes linking
the northern countries to the Mediterranean.

To a lesser degree, other towns enjoyed similar activity. The practice
of holding several fairs spread to all parts, and 400 grants of privilege
were made in the reign of Charles Vlll alone. Like the chief towns of the
kingdom (Rouen, Tours, Troyes, Dijon and Montpellier), Paris had its
fairs, at Saint-Denis and Saint-Germain-des-Pres. These fairs were real
international markets for certain products needed in industry — salt (in
which a few maritime countries had a virtual monopoly), alum (which
was indispensable in the manufacture of cloth), silk, spices, and metals
(in which France had but poor natural resources), especially copper,
which was needed in the casting of artillery and was imported from mines
in Bohemia and Upper Germany.

Together with this increasing trade went considerable movements of
money, transfers of precious metals and all kinds of coinage, which were
difficult to transport owing to the dangers attendant on travel. The
scarcity of money was not conducive to the ever-growing needs of
commerce. Like other countries, France suffered, at the end of the
fifteenth century, from this shortage of precious metals, and this neces-
sitated the use of credit and the intervention of banks. Banks were not
unknown in France from the thirteenth century onwards, if not earlier.
But political crises had suspended their activities which, until now, had
been primarily concerned with money-changing and short-term loans.
After the Hundred Years War, they reappeared, controlled by Italians,
when the Medici established a branch of their bank at Lyons. Others
followed, and they became more numerous as the sixteenth century
approached. These companies, most of them with headquarters at Lyons,
multiplied by setting up branches in the main towns of the kingdom,
especially in Paris, which was decidedly subordinate to Lyons.

All these companies were in the hands of foreigners — Italians, from
Florence or Lucca, like the Capponi, the Gadagnes and the Bonvisi,
or Germans whose activity was controlled by banks in Augsburg or
Niimberg. French banks were few and far between and traded only inci-
dentally in money ; and even then they did so only in conjunction with
their merchant activity, so that it is difficult to draw the line between
banking proper and large-scale trading in general. They kept almost
entirely in their own hands banking business ‘at the court of Rome’,
where they acted as intermediaries and lent money to the recipients of
benefices and to litigants who had dealings with the papal administration.

This trading involved somewhat complex operations on which the

313

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

business of the fairs and international commerce were based: bills of
exchange, payments by transfer and balancing of credits, and deposits
and loans. It was thus possible to settle accounts to which the lack of
circulation of currency would otherwise have brought insurmountable
difficulties. Even governments had to seek the help of bankers, when
their enterprises demanded the advance of large sums. Charles VIII’s
campaign in Italy was financed by loans granted by Italian bankers at
Lyons. This state of affairs continued, and from then on every political
undertaking was accompanied by an undercurrent of financial trans-
actions, as the imperial election of 1519 showed.

It was in this way that certain families amassed great fortunes which
were the basis of their power. And these were very different from the
landed fortunes of former times. The mercantile bourgeoisie, which had
ties with the administration, made great strides in the reigns of Charles VIII
and his successors. It was certainly not without predecessors, of whom
the best known is Jacques Cceur, but the growth of this new class was
hardly noticeable before the end of the fifteenth century, when the de
Beaunes, the Bohiers, the Huraults and the Brigonnets made their mark.
They were merchants, financiers and administrators of the royal treasury
all at once, and without their aid the state could not exist. They took
advantage of this to have themselves appointed to the great offices of
Government and Church, and they aspired to raise themselves to the level
of the great landowners and even to gain access to the nobility.

This emphasis on money, and the fact that it was indispensable in
certain industries and in large-scale trade, mark the advent of capitalism
in the economic life of France. In the silk industry, the capitalist who
bought and imported the raw material had it processed by a number of
workers, whose equipment he himself owned; and afterwards, when its
manufacture was complete, he marketed the cloth. Differences became
more marked between the merchant who possessed the capital, ran risks
and enjoyed the profits, and the worker to whom he paid a wage. The
same distinctions were to be found in the printing trade. Very often, the
same merchant who possessed capital lent money at interest. This might
be against the laws of the Church, but he resorted to all kinds of merely
formal precautions which concealed the true nature of his transactions.
In this way, he became the creditor of the artisans and peasants whose
land he eventually held as security. This was the beginning of vast changes
in the ownership of landed property.

The capitalists made loans even to the king; his needs were great and
he contracted more debts every day. But his credit was so low that he
had to borrow with the great personages at court standing surety for him,
and at rates of interest much higher than those in use among business
men. It was not unknown even for newly-rich bourgeois to buy the
administrative offices which the government was beginning to use as a

314

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

FRANCE UNDER CHARLES VIII AND LOUIS XII

source of revenue. Public services and even part of the power of the State
were thus passing, as though they were part of their inheritance, into the
hands of ordinary subjects. First the king put financial offices up for
sale, then judicial offices ; at first he did so diffidently and with all kinds
of precautions : sales were disguised as loans, which the king never repaid.
This practice continued to develop, particularly in and after the reign of
Louis XII, as the needs of the treasury increased and administrative
services became more numerous. These were practices new in the economic
life of the nation, and they closely affected its social structure. The changes
they produced became clearly manifest with the renewal of business
activity following the end of the English wars.

3T5

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

CHAPTER XI

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS AND
THE CATHOLIC KINGS

T he year 1492 was an annus mirabilis for Spain. Granada was taken
and the eight centuries of war with the Moslems brought to an end.
The Jews were expelled from Spain, and the New World was dis-
covered. Castile, which all through the Middle Ages had been secluded
in the centre of the peninsula, suddenly emerged as a world Power. The
rise of Castile was rather a matter of luck and accident than of thoughtful
planning. But when opportunities came the Castilians rose to the occasion
and seized them as successfully as they could, the chief limitation being
the economic factor. Fate put enormous wealth into the hands of a
nation with high ambitions and lofty ideals, but with little economic
sense. No wonder the great empire which emerged was beset with financial
problems. The real wonder is that it lasted so long.

The population in the peninsula under the Crown of Castile was not
large. A count taken for military purposes in 1482 gave a total of
7,500,000. But the count was very rough and the figure seems much too
high. Another count, taken in 1530 for tax purposes, gave only 3,433,000,
but this did not include Galicia (perhaps with 600,000 people) or the
kingdoms of Granada and Murcia, also densely populated. A third tax-
count in 1541 gave about 6,272,000. Considering that 1530-70 was
probably a peak period, the figure for 1482 ought to be much lower than
for 1541, but should probably be over 4,500,000. As for the states of
the Crown of Aragon, the approximate figures are: Aragon 270,000
(1495), Valencia 270,000 (1510) and Catalonia 307,000 (1512).

The people of Castile were mainly engaged in agriculture or led a
nomadic pastoral life. Most of the arable land was owned by the nobility,
the military orders, the Church, monastic orders, and the Crown, or was
the common land of towns and villages. The taxes were borne by peasants,
the noblemen being exempt. Cereals were the most important crop,
though they were often insufficient and wheat had to be imported.
Ferdinand thought he could supply Castile with com from Sicily, and
thus increase sheep-rearing and wool production for the Flemish market.
Charles V, who wanted the peasants for soldiers, supplied Castile with
wheat from the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. The peninsular
states of the Crown of Aragon imported com from the other Mediterranean
states, Sicily and Sardinia; Valencia sometimes had it from Roumania or
Turkey. The Castilians thought Aragon might provide a market for their
corn, and its export to Aragon was declared free (1480). New land in

316

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

Murcia was devoted to growing wheat for Aragon. But the shepherds,
who wanted the land for grazing, rose in opposition. After Isabella’s
death and subsequent friction between Castile and Ferdinand, the
Castilian Cortes tried to stop exports of corn to Aragon. In spite of good
harvests they insisted on this again in 1518, and finally in 1525 exports
were banned completely. The ban was in the end lifted by Charles (1537).
Aragon, and sometimes Catalonia, relied on imports from Languedoc
and Provence. The Basque provinces were supplied from Nantes with
wheat from Brittany and the west of France. The wheat supply to the
Indies was another liability. It had to be brought from Germany,
Flanders, France and the Barbary states.

Though the harvests of 1509-20 were better than those of 1503-7, the
Castilian wheat-crop was always insufficient. As from 1502 the Crown
had to control the price, though the official prices were not always ob-
served. The price-index for wheat, if taken at 100 in 1511, had reached
273 by 1530, although the influx of American silver had not yet affected
it. The peasantry was in destitution and hunger. According to official
texts the peasants were head over ears in debt and were compelled to sell
com still on the threshing ground to the middlemen who profited by
their poverty. Not until c. 1535 did changes begin which were to last
some thirty years. Thanks to American silver, new buyers of land appeared,
but it was then used for vineyards, not for wheat, and by mid-century
the price of wine was going up.

For the economy of Castile, sheep rearing was far more important.
The nomadic shepherds and their movements were under the control of
the Mesta ( Honorable Consejo de los Pastores de estos Reinos), a national
guild of sheepowners dating from the thirteenth century. According to
incomplete figures, the average number of sheep for each year from 1512
to 1521 was c. 2,840,000. Most of the pasture lands of the south, where
they wintered and which the sheepowners rented, belonged to the military
orders, whose estates Ferdinand and Isabella had annexed to the Crown.
The Mesta was extremely wealthy, and whenever Charles found himself
in difficulties he appealed to it for help. The Mesta acted as banker for the
Crown, in 1518, 1519, 1525, 1526, 1528 and in later years. In return many
laws were passed favouring sheep rearing as against agriculture, and forcing
land to be left uncultivated for the benefit of the flocks. National economic
life and much of the royal finances were centred in the flocks. Besides
occasionally lending to the Crown, the shepherds paid an annual rent for
the pasturages that nominally belonged to the military orders, but were in
fact under the direct control of the Crown. Charles V often farmed out these
pasturages and the collection of their rents was accepted by foreign
bankers as surety for loans. Thus in 1525 they were granted to the Fuggers
in return for advances made to Charles for his election as emperor.

The royal policy of protecting the wool trade had the same reason

23 3I7 NCMH I

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

behind it. Under Ferdinand and Isabella an order of 1462 was still
enforced by which one-third of the wool had to be reserved for the
Castilian weavers. Charles later tried to raise the proportion to half,
but the measure, intended to develop home industry, was opposed by the
exporters and by the Mesta and had to be withdrawn. Genoese merchants
controlled perhaps 40 per cent of the wool trade, and this led them to
play an active part in Spanish trade and banking. Castilian wool was
shipped to Italy from Malaga and Cartagena; wool from Aragon, the
Maestrat and the Castilian hinterland of Valencia went from Tortosa
and Valencia. Exports to Flanders were the most important, the great
wool markets being at Burgos and Medina del Campo. In 1494 Ferdinand
and Isabella granted the merchants of Burgos the privilege of organising
their Consulado, a guild for the conduct of home and foreign trade on
the model of the Catalan Consolats de la Mar (Valencia 1283, Mallorca
1 343, Barcelona 1 347). The Burgos Consulado had the right to fix freight
and maritime insurance rates. Shipping in the Bay of Biscay was brought
under its control, and an agreement was made with Bilbao (1495), the
port which actually provided most of the shipping. Seven or eight
thousand pack mules went between Burgos and Bilbao carrying twelve to
fifteen thousand woolpacks every year (roughly 900 tons). One fleet or
two, as required, sailed every year from Bilbao to Antwerp.

Seville was meanwhile emerging as the great centre for trade with the
Americas. The Casa de Contratacion to control all trade with the Indies
was established there in 1503 and later on (1543) a Consulado modelled
on that of Burgos. Seville, moreover, with a monopoly of trade with
America, both export and import, attracted all foreign merchants,
expanding rapidly in the sixteenth century and becoming the largest city
in Spain (25,000 inhabitants in 1517, 90,000 in 1594).

In the Catalan-speaking countries the picture was different. Valencia,
and even more Barcelona, were now in decline after a brilliant past. Their
political expansion had grown out of the expansion of their Mediterranean
trade : the Balearics, Sicily, Malta, Greece, Sardinia and Naples, one after
another came under Catalan rule or influence (trade settlements on the
coasts of North Africa, the Black Sea and in Ethiopia). This early Catalan
nucleus of empire, was the contribution that Ferdinand brought as his
patrimony to the formation of the later empire, along with the legacy of
Catalan-Aragonese friendships and enmities on the diplomatic chessboard
of Europe. On the other hand, the later empire failed to use the experience
of the Catalans in empire-building, in the administration of overseas
territories (except for borrowing their institutions of the Consolat and
the viceroy) and their economic good sense. There were two reasons for
this: the nationalistic tendency of the Castilians to regard the empire as
their own possession, with the royal support of this view; and the decline
of Catalonia.

318

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

The biological roots of this decline go back to the fourteenth century
and may be found in the exhaustion of a small people after their Mediter-
ranean expansion, the Black Death, and losses among the nobility in the
expeditions to Sardinia in the third quarter of the fourteenth century.
Catalonia was also affected by the European economic crisis at the end
of the century, and a number of adverse conditions developed in trade,
finance and banking, to which the Catalans often failed to make adequate
adjustment because of their too rigid traditional methods. After the
Barcelona banking crisis of 1381-3 the financial capital of the Crown of
Aragon shifted to Valencia, which throve on its agriculture (based on rice
and sugar), the attraction of the Aragonese wool exports, and the facilities
which it afforded to Genoese capital and merchants.

After 1430 dissensions developed in Barcelona between the merchants
and craftsmen on the one hand and wealthy citizens and landowners on
the other, and in the country districts between the feudal landowners and
the peasantry. These problems were aggravated by the neglect of
Alphonso V, who left his peninsula domains to settle in his newly acquired
kingdom of Naples (1432-58). The various attempts by the authorities
and the merchants to redress the situation might have succeeded had they
been supported by a sympathetic and coherent royal policy such as that
of the past sovereigns of the house of Barcelona.

The devaluation of the coinage in 1458, while it was welcomed by the
merchants as a measure to foster trade, was resented by the landowners
and rentiers. These sabotaged the measure, causing such animosity
between the social classes and such unrest that the stage was set for a
major drama. This was the Catalan Revolution (1462-72), led mainly by
the Barcelona merchants, against John II, the father of Ferdinand, from
which Catalonia emerged utterly exhausted, although the final settlement
between the king and the country was satisfactory as regards the national
and democratic liberties for which the Catalans had fought. Social
unrest continued with the revolt of the peasants ( remences ) against the
feudal landowners. Many merchants left Barcelona during the war and
settled in Valencia, but the final blow came with the establishment of the
Inquisition in the teeth of Catalan opposition (1484-7). Then most of
the merchants, Jews or converted Jews, left the country with their capital
and goods, so that the municipal authorities could fairly describe Barcelona
as ‘completely lost and destroyed’.

A moderate revival of Catalan trade with North Africa occurred in
the early sixteenth century, with the expeditions against Mers-el-Kebir,
Oran, Algiers and Tripoli in the years 1505-10; Cardinal Jimenez de
Cisneros played a large part in organising the expeditions, but substantial
Catalan financial help, armed contingents and shipping were engaged.
While the occupied cities were annexed to Jimenez’s archdiocese of Toledo,
the Catalans gained the right to trade with the new territories (1512)

319 93-*

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE RENAISSANCE

and preferential terms for their textile exports to those lands. During
the first half of the sixteenth century Catalan trade continued with Sicily,
Naples, North Africa, and Egypt, but it was only a shadow of what it
had been. The Mediterranean, infested with Turkish and Berber pirates,
had lost much of its importance by the removal of the centres of European
economic life to the north and west. The exclusion of the Catalans from
trade with America deprived them of their last chance of redress. After
this, towards the middle of the century, Barcelona sank into obscurity.

The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella (19 October 1469) took place
during the period when Catalonia was outside the authority of the bride-
groom’s father, John II, who was not recognised again until 1472. The
Arab kingdom of Granada was not conquered until 1492, and Ferdinand,
after Isabella’s death, when he was in Castile as sole governor to ad-
minister the realm, but not as king, conquered the kingdom of Navarre
in 1512. Thus all the peninsula except Portugal later came under the
authority of one man, Charles V.

The union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and
Isabella is therefore an important landmark in this evolution and its
constitutional aspects deserve examination. The marriage of Ferdinand
with Isabella was planned by the crafty John II of Aragon, who closely
watched developments in Castile in connection with the succession of
Henry IV. Court gossip insisted that Princess Juana, the queen’s daughter,
was not the child of King Henry (known as El Impotente) but of a
Portuguese nobleman, Beltran de la Cueva, after whom Juana was
contemptuously called La Beltraneja. The party of the nobles and prelates
opposing Henry made capital of this gossip in their intrigues. The king,
who under pressure from the opposition had sometimes admitted the
illegitimacy of Juana, stated on his death bed that she was his own
daughter. (In our own day Dr Maranon, after collecting all the available
medical evidence, has concluded that she probably was the daughter of
the king.) The opposition party, however, managed to get her declared
illegitimate and supported Prince Alfonso as the heir to the throne.
He and Henry were sons of John II of Castile (1406-54), but Alfonso
and the future Isabella the Catholic were the children of his second wife,
Isabella of Portugal. This Portugese queen was insane, like Juana the
Mad, the daughter of Isabella and mother of Charles V. She was probably
responsible for the streak of abnormality that ran through the Spanish
Habsburgs. Prince Alfonso died young (1464). As soon as John II of
Aragon heard the news, he dispatched agents to Castile and began to cast
his toils round Isabella in order to obtain her for his son. First, though the
agreement of Toros de Guisando (1468) seems now to have been a fake,
Henry recognised Isabella as his heir. Then the other suitors were dis-
carded. These were the French duke of Guienne, brother of Louis XI,
and Alfonso V of Portugal. The marriage of Isabella to Ferdinand

320

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

was the final outcome of John II’s many intrigues, his league with the
archbishop of Toledo, Alphonso Carrillo, and his bribery of Castilian
notables, particularly those to whom the custody of the young princess
(then about 18) had been entrusted, their role now being to advise her to
marry Ferdinand. In all these negotiations John II was helped by the
most prominent Jewish families of Castile (the Benvenistes and Abraham
Seneor) and of Aragon (La Cavalleria), who were linked by common
business interests and who believed that the young sovereigns would
protect their race against the anti-semitism that had been mounting in
Castile since 1391.

John II, of the Castilian illegitimate line of the Trastamaras, though a
sovereign of the Crown of Aragon, had always considered himself a Cas-
tilian prince, no less than his Castilian second wife Juana Enriquez. Among
his perennial anxieties were his large estates in Castile and Estremadura
coveted by rival nobles. In addition, all the thrones in the peninsula were
occupied by himself and his sisters. His brother, Alfonso V, had been a
sovereign of the Crown of Aragon and brought under it a new kingdom,
Naples, and John was his heir. His sister Maria had been the first wife
of John II of Castile and was the mother of the reigning Castilian king,
Henry IV. His other sister Eleanor was the wife of Edward I of Portugal.
He himself, by his first marriage to Queen Blanca of Navarre had become
king consort of this kingdom too and kept its crown after her death. All
this was more than enough to inflame an ambitious man like John II
with the desire to bring all these kingdoms under his rule or that of his
young son. There were also considerations of power and diplomacy.
Foremost among these was his rivalry with Louis XI of France and the
need to build up in the peninsula a force to match that north of the
Pyrenees.

The surprising fact about the union of Castile and Aragon is the absence
of any agreement on the matter between sovereigns or cortes, apart from
the marriage contract between the young couple, Ferdinand who was
eighteen, and Isabella who was nineteen. The contract was signed by
Isabella’s representatives and Ferdinand on 7 January 1469 at Cervera,
the headquarters of John II’s army in his campaign against Catalonia.
Two objectives were met by the contract : the Castilian demand for guaran-
tees against interference by Ferdinand and the Aragonese in the government
of Castile; and John’s determination to have Isabella for his son at any
cost. The contract provided that Ferdinand should live with Isabella in
Castile and neither leave the country nor take their children out of
Castile without her consent. All letters and deeds must be issued and
signed by the queen and king jointly, in the kingdoms of either. No
person must be appointed by the king to the royal council of Castile
or to any other office, other than a Castilian national, and with the
advice and agreement of the queen. All cities and fortified places in

321

THE RENAISSANCE

Castile must take an oath of allegiance to the queen alone. The king
must not enter upon any war, or make peace or any alliance with any
other king or lord without the queen’s advice and consent. In token of the
‘ confederation ’ with the kingdom of Castile, and to augment her dowry,
Ferdinand was to hand over to her two cities (mentioned in the text)
in each of the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia, and Sicily, plus a third city
in each to be chosen later by her (nothing is said about Catalonia, as the
country was then up in arms against John II). Ferdinand was to give
Isabella 100,000 gold florins within four months of the contract, and in
case of trouble within Castile Ferdinand would personally lead 4000
spearmen to suppress the trouble.

The docility with which Ferdinand and his crafty father had accepted
these terms was explained on the death of Henry IV of Castile (1474).
Then Ferdinand sprang a surprise by claiming that he, and not Isabella,
was the legitimate heir as the only male descendant of the house of Trasta-
mara. This being a Castilian affair was submitted to Cardinal Pedro
Gonzalez de Mendoza and to the archbishop of Toledo, Alonso Carrilloz.
The main points of their award were as follows: in all laws, coins and
seals Ferdinand’s name should precede Isabella’s, but the arms of Castile
should precede those of Aragon. The revenue of Castile should be used to
defray all the expenses of its administration and what remained should
be shared by the queen and the king in a form to be decided between
themselves. The same condition should apply to the income from
Ferdinand’s side. Names of candidates for vacant bishoprics should be
submitted to the pope jointly by king and queen, although the queen
alone should suggest the names. Decisions of the courts should be
signed by both, should they be in the same place. If they were in different
provinces, each would administer justice in the province where he or she
was, but if either was in a place along with the royal council he or she
would hear cases from all the provinces. All this, however, could apply
at that time only to Castile, as John II was still alive and Ferdinand did
not become king of Aragon until 1479.

Leaving aside these technicalities, the fundamental structure of the
union of the Hispanic kingdoms and later of the Habsburg empire or
Monarquia, as it was called, was that of a loose confederation. Its main
points were: each of them retained its own parliament, political insti-
tutions, laws, courts, armed forces, taxation and coinage. None was
constitutionally subject to any of the others, and the subjects of any were
aliens in the others. No system of extradition of criminals existed until
much later, and there were customs barriers between Castile and Navarre,
and between Castile and Aragon. The powers of the monarch were
neatly defined by a later political writer, Solorzano Pereira : ‘ the Monarch
who keeps all these countries together is sovereign of each rather than
king of all ’. Although some writers occasionally referred to the ‘ King of

322

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

Spain’, constitutionally the title did not exist. The monarch used the
various titles corresponding to each of his states. There were seventeen
provinces in the Netherlands all recognising the same prince, but each
by a different title and vesting him with different powers.

The monarch was represented in each state, as its sovereign, by a
viceroy. The viceroy in the Habsburg monarchy had its origin in the
medieval Catalan-Aragonese union. On account of the federal nature of
this union the sovereign was represented in the state in which he did not
happen to be by his heir, or a prominent member of the royal family as
his lieutenant. In the fourteenth century a vicar-general appeared in
Athens and later a viceroy in Sardinia. Christopher Columbus was the
first to receive the title of Visorey for the Indies. On the death of Ferdinand,
his widowed queen, Germaine de Foix, continued as vicereine of Valencia,
and his natural son Alfonso de Aragon, archbishop of Saragossa, as
viceroy of Aragon. The viceroy in the states of the Crown of Aragon in
the early days of Charles V was expected to be a member of the royal
family, and when Philip II annexed Portugal a promise to the same
effect was given. But conditions gradually changed and viceroys were
first chosen from the Catalan and Aragonese high nobility and later from
the Castilian nobility. From the days of Charles onwards there were
viceroys in each country of the monarchy — Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia,
Sicily, Naples, Sardinia and Navarre, plus those in Peru and New Spain
(that is, Mexico) in America. The Netherlands had a governor-general.

The monarch was surrounded by a constellation of councils for the
government of the various states, Castile, Aragon (with the Italian posses-
sions) and the Indies. The councils were not territorial but personal — in
the sense that they did not sit in the country they administered but always
accompanied the person of the sovereign. Thus the federal traditions of
the Crown of Aragon, firmly established since the union of Catalonia and
Aragon (1137) prevailed over the Castilian system of annexation and
centralisation, displayed throughout the changing relations between the
kingdoms of Leon and Castile, after their final union in 1230, and in
the expansions of Castile over western Andalucia, Granada and America.
The Burgundian tradition was also federalist, and this probably explains
Charles V’s consistent respect for the federal structure.

The Indies were regarded as Castile’s own possessions, and administered
in accordance with Castilian, and not federalist, tradition. The sovereign
there was the king of Castile and the viceroys represented him as such.
There was never any attempt to set up self-government or representative
institutions ; the colonies were administered from Castile by the Consejo
de lndias. Isabella had definitely stated in her will that since those
countries had been discovered and conquered ‘at the expense of my
kingdoms and settled with nationals of these kingdoms, it is right that all
their trade and traffic should belong to my kingdoms of Castile and Leon

323

THE RENAISSANCE

and be conducted from them; and everything brought from the Indies
should go to them and be for them’. Only natives of the kingdoms of
Castile could settle or trade with America, and trade and shipping were
conducted exclusively through the port of Seville. This rule was kept, in
spite of temporary concessions by Ferdinand (1505), after Isabella’s
death, to the subjects of all his states, and by Charles to the German
bankers, the Welsers and the Fuggers. A petition by the city of Barcelona
(1522) to be allowed to trade with America was not granted.

The other case of extension of Castilian rule was that of the conquest
of the Arab kingdom of Granada. The terms of the treaty of surrender
(25 November 1491) were generous. The kingdom was put under the
authority of a Castilian governor, but the inhabitants were allowed to
retain their Moslem religion, their laws and judges, their ancient usages,
language and dress, the enjoyment of their property, and were given a
guarantee that taxes would not exceed those they had paid to their
Moorish sovereigns. But these terms, observed as long as Hernando de
Talavera, archbishop of Granada (1493-1507), conducted the attempted
conversion of Moslems, were soon abandoned. The slow rate of progress
that worried Isabella caused Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros to be sent to
join the archbishop and accelerate it. Under pressure mass conversions
then took place. This pressure, and the public burning of Islamic religious
books, finally made the Moors revolt. Then came the expulsion from
the kingdom of Granada of all Moslems over the age of fourteen who did
not accept baptism (12 February 1502). They were not allowed to go to
North Africa or to the states of the Crown of Aragon (though Ferdinand
allowed many of them to take refuge in Valencia); they could only go to
Egypt or leave Castile by her frontier with Biscay. The new converts,
known as the Moriscos, came automatically under the loving care of the
Inquisition. By a later decree of Charles V (1525) they were forbidden
to use Arab names, or to wear jewellery with Arabic designs : only crosses
and Christian images were allowed. They were forbidden to make marriage
contracts in accordance with their ancient laws. In 1556 the enforced
use of Castilian was decreed, the Arab language being banned under very
severe penalties. This and other harsh later measures precipitated the
new revolt of 1571, the dispersal of the Moors over the Castilian countries
and their final expulsion from Spain in 1610.

The outline of the federal monarchy given above requires qualification
in two respects to make clear how it worked in practice. Though in
principle no state was in any way subject to another, the American
treasure, and the fact that the army was recruited mainly in Castile, where
the monarch and the Castilian courtiers and advisers surrounding him
resided, gave Castile a position of hegemony. This was reinforced by the
nationalistic ambitions of the Castilians, who continually sought civil
and ecclesiastic posts in the other countries. It was thus that the Catalans

324

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

and Aragonese were soon eliminated from the administration of their
Italian possessions. But although royal policy encouraged this trend, and
even Isabella was reported by Guicciardini to have said ‘Aragon is not
ours and we must go and conquer it’, no attempt was ever made during
the reigns of Ferdinand or Charles upon the freedom of any of the other
states, in striking contrast with later policy. Even Navarre, conquered in
1512 and annexed to the Crown of Castile in 1515, was left her indepen-
dence and political institutions, Ferdinand following this time the Catalan-
Aragonese pattern of confederation. The other important influence towards
centralisation in the empire was an institution, and an extremely powerful
one, common to most of its countries — the Inquisition, governed from
the court by the Consejo de la Santa y Suprema Inquisicion, and not
infrequently used for political purposes (below, pp. 334-8).

The union brought about by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella
had to face a number of crises. The first was on the death of Henry IV
of Castile (1474), when Alfonso V of Portugal took up the claim of
Princess Juana La Beltraneja to the Castilian throne, and invaded the
country. Then, as in previous years when a Portuguese party was in-
fluential in the Castilian court, the shape of a united Spain hung in the
balance. Was Castile going to incline towards the Atlantic or towards the
Mediterranean? Geographically and culturally Portugal and Castile were
closer than Castile and the Catalan-speaking countries. The union of
Castile and Portugal might then have been successful and Spain might
have been spared much internal strife to come, generated by the union of
Castile with the Catalan states; whereas union was bound to fail in the
days of the Philips, when Portugal with her colonial empire had become
stronger. But whereas Portugal had defeated the Castilian army at
Aljubarrota (1385) and so preserved her independence, now the Castilian
victory at Toro (1476) maintained the separation between the two countries.

The union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon went through another
crisis on Isabella’s death (1504). By her will she appointed her mad
daughter Juana queen of Castile ( se flora natural propietaria de estos reinos ).
Ferdinand, therefore, in spite of all the previous elaborate agreements,
was dispossessed of the crown, and Isabella again separated Castile from
Aragon. Only if Juana should be abroad or be unwilling or unable to
govern (as was in fact the case) would Ferdinand be recalled as ‘ governor
and administrator’, and only if he condescended to take an oath to govern
the kingdom well and not dismember it. Philip of Austria, Juana’s
husband, was recognised as king consort. These unwise measures soon
brought the results that might have been expected. An anti-Ferdinand
party, led by Philip, was supported by the grandees. Despite Ferdinand’s
offer that Castile should be ruled jointly by Juana, Philip and himself
(24 November 1505), when Juana and her husband landed from the
Netherlands, Philip was soon supported by a large Castilian army, and

325

THE RENAISSANCE

father and son-in-law decided that Ferdinand should withdraw to his
own kingdoms (27 June 1506). Thus all the efforts for the union of the
Hispanic countries were foiled again.

The Cortes of Aragon (1502) and those of Catalonia (1503) had taken
an oath of allegiance to Juana, but with the proviso that the oath would
become null and void if the king should have legitimate male issue. The
condition was the more remarkable because Isabella, although still alive,
was already ill (she probably died of cancer of the uterus) and no issue
could be expected from her. The resourceful Ferdinand, who liked neither
Philip nor the prospect of a foreign dynasty ruling Spain, decided to
marry again, as a move in a new political and diplomatic game. As a
protection against Philip and his father the Emperor Maximilian (Philip
was already claiming the kingdom of Naples on the pretext that Castilian
troops had contributed to its conquest) Ferdinand had made a nimble
volte face and signed an alliance with his bitterest enemy, Louis XII of
France (Treaty of Blois, 12 October 1505), promising to marry the French
king’s niece, Germaine de Foix. When Philip landed in Spain from the
Netherlands the marriage had already taken place (18 March 1506),
following negotiations conducted by the Catalan Joan d’Enguera, bishop
of Lerida. Ferdinand and his new queen moved to Naples. To ensure his
possession of that kingdom he dismissed Castilian officials there, replacing
them with trusted Catalans. His own nephew, John of Aragon, was
substituted for the Castilian viceroy Gonzalo de Cordoba, the Great
Captain.

The whole situation suddenly changed again with the unexpected death
of Philip (25 September 1506). A regency council was formed, presided
over by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros. The unruly Castilian nobility
raised their heads once more, and those who had supported Philip now
wanted his father, the Emperor Maximilian, to intervene. Jimenez and
the regents, however, asked Ferdinand to come back, confident that he
would know how to deal firmly with the restive nobles. But Ferdinand
was in no hurry, wishing first to consolidate his Italian possessions and
have a meeting with his new friend Louis XII (June 1507). Not until the
late summer did Ferdinand come to Castile and set about the task of
pacifying the rebellious and winning back the confidence of the people.
Finally, in the Cortes of Madrid (October 1510) the ex-king took the
oath as administrator of the realm on behalf of his insane daughter.

The hopes of an heir from Germaine de Foix were dashed after the
birth of a male child who lived for only a couple of hours. In the last
period of his fife the old king’s love and solicitude turned to his younger
grandson, Ferdinand, the future ruler of Austria, who seems to have been
preferred in his grandfather’s heart and schemes to his brother Charles,
the future Holy Roman Emperor. When the grandfather died Cardinal
Jimenez closely watched the friends of young Ferdinand and their

326

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

plottings against Charles, in which Ferdinand was encouraged by his
father’s stepmother Germaine. When Charles went to Saragossa to obtain
recognition as king from the Cortes of Aragon (1518), he had to face a
separatist movement based on the recognition of Ferdinand as Charles’s
heir (as against his future children) to the throne of Aragon.

The last state brought into the union of the Hispanic kingdoms was
Navarre. John II of Aragon, through his first marriage with Blanche,
queen of Navarre, had possessed this kingdom until his death. The rights
to the Crown had passed through his daughter by his first wife, Eleanor,
married to Gaston IV de Foix, to her son Gaston and his children. Of these
the son, Francis Phoebus, died young and without issue, and the Crown
passed to the daughter Catharine, wife of John d’Albret. The Foix branch,
however, considered the d’Albrets as intruders and claimed that the rights
had passed from Eleanor’s son Gaston to his brother John. Now the
latter, married to Mary, sister of Louis XII of France, was the father of
Germaine de Foix, Ferdinand’s second wife. In other words Ferdinand
was in a strong position, through his wife, to make a serious claim to
the kingdom of Navarre. Other circumstances further complicated this
dynastic tangle. First, there were internal divisions and rival parties
within Navarre. Moreover, while the rivalry between Ferdinand and
Louis XII had been running high, the French had supported the Foix
against the d’Albrets, but when Ferdinand married a Foix there was no
point in doing so any longer and Louis changed his protege. The Navarrese
problem was also reflected in the diplomatic chessboard. When Ferdinand
sought the friendship of the French king by the Treaty of Blois, Navarre
was for the time being put on one side. But when Ferdinand was once
more firmly established in Castile (1510), the French alliance was no
longer of any use to him. By this time Ferdinand was entering upon
the last and most brilliant phase of his diplomatic activities, and com-
peting with France for hegemony in western Europe. The position of
Navarre on the Pyrenees between the realms of the two rivals became of
vital strategic importance to both of them.

Events were precipitated by the death of Gaston de Foix, Germaine’s
brother, at the battle of Ravenna (1 1 April 1512). Ferdinand found that his
wife unexpectedly inherited claims to Navarre: he was determined to
make full and quick use of the fact. As usual, he prepared his coup
carefully. While secretly gathering a Castilian and an Aragonese army,
he continued his negotiations with John d’Albret of Navarre, in order to
lull him, realising that after his (Ferdinand’s) marriage with a Foix the
king of France had been drawn closer to the d’Albrets. Moreover he
prevailed upon Henry VIII to send an army to Guienne, ostensibly to
recover the ancient English possessions but in fact to threaten France and
to prevent her from helping Navarre and so avoid involving himself in a
major war. On the pretext that the Navarrese king was schismatic because

327

THE RENAISSANCE

he had adhered to the council at Pisa, summoned at the instigation of
Louis XII against the pope, Ferdinand obtained from Julius II, his ally in
the Holy League against France, a bull of excommunication (21 July 1512)
depriving the d’Albrets of their rights and freeing the Navarrese from their
allegiance to them. Meanwhile Ferdinand’s spies had obtained inform-
ation of negotiations between Louis XII and John d’Albret. Skilfully
piecing together the various pieces of information received, he drafted a
resume of an imaginary treaty between his rivals, pledging themselves to
attack Castile. He used this text (17 July 1512) as justification for his
own attack on Navarre, pleading self-defence. The next day the French
and the Navarrese signed the real treaty at Blois, by which John d’Albret
engaged himself to support the king of France against attacks from
Ferdinand and Henry VIII.

On 21 July the duke of Alba at the head of a Castilian army invaded
Navarre from the west and a few days later an Aragonese army entered
from the south. By early September Navarre lay conquered by force and
cunning. Ferdinand hesitated on the political future of his new kingdom.
It was first annexed to the Crown of Aragon, but in order (according to
Zurita) to prevent the Navarrese from uniting with the Aragonese and
pressing for more freedoms and exemptions, Navarre was finally annexed
to Castile (Cortes of Burgos, 1515). But in this Aragonese, and not
Castilian, traditions were observed. The king of the new dynasty was
represented in Pamplona by a viceroy; but the cortes, the permanent
council of deputies that represented parliament between sessions, the
internal administration, laws, coinage, taxation and finance under the
camara de contos, all remained unchanged ; the only change was that a
council of Navarre was organised, on the model of the council of Aragon,
to be at the king’s side with help and advice on the ruling of the newly
acquired kingdom.

The great achievement of Ferdinand and Isabella was to give shape to
the chaotic Castile they had found and to create the new institutions on
which the government of the peninsular states was to rest. The medieval
administration was transformed by a long and gradual process into that
of a Renaissance state, expanded and adapted to become the instrument
of government of a world-wide monarchy. It is reported that Philip II
once stopped before a painting of Ferdinand and murmured, ‘To him we
owe it all’.

The central principle round which all the reforms revolved was the
concentration of power in the Crown. The degree of concentration was
stronger in Castile than in Aragon in accordance with the political
traditions of each and the attitude of the inhabitants and local authorities,
though in most cases resistance was useless and the royal authority pre-
vailed, as was exemplified by Ferdinand’s introduction of the Inquisition

328

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

into Catalonia in spite of three years of resistance. The Crown first fought
the unruly and self-seeking nobles always ready to revolt and snatch
mercedes (concessions of land or grants of money) from an increasingly
depleted royal patrimony. To restore the latter was the first task of Ferdi-
nand and Isabella. The same aim promoted their annexation to the
Crown of the grandmasterships of the three military orders, along with
their very extensive estates.

Ferdinand and Isabella did not object to the large numbers of titled
people, provided they quietly acknowledged the royal power and agreed
to raise its economic position. There were seven dukes in Castile at their
accession, fifteen at the end of their reign, and twenty-five grandees in
the early days of Charles V. But the policy of curbing the power of the
nobility, continued by Charles V, was not pursued. The income of the
nobility in the early sixteenth century was estimated at i ,400,000 ducats.
As for the lesser Castilian nobility, the hidalgos, they were legion. The
earliest estimate we have of hidalgos (exempt from taxation) and pecheros
(taxpayers) for the allocation of the subsidy of 1541 gives totals of 108,358
and 784,578 respectively. These figures being for householders, the total
for each class might be 540,000 hidalgos to some 3,923,000 commoners.

The action taken by Ferdinand and Isabella was directed against the
high nobility. Very skilfully and properly, Ferdinand and Isabella brought
the matter before the Cortes of Toledo of 1480, but left the initiative to
the representatives of the cities. They petitioned that the royal revenues
should be restored to their legitimate proportions,’ and that to prevent
higher taxes having to be levied, grants made to noblqp without sufficient
cause should be revised and revoked. The queen’s confessor, Hernando de
Talavera, was entrusted with working out the revision, and as a result an
annual revenue of 30,000,000 maravedis passed from the nobles into the
royal treasury. But Isabella was not satisfied about the results as is shown
by an unusual clause in her will. Conscious of her duties as queen to the
royal patrimony, she ordered the nobles to restore to the Crown anything
granted them or retained by them that was not their due. Many grandees,
such as the dukes of Alba and Medina Sidonia, the marquis of Villena
and others, found themselves after the queen’s death faced with her un-
welcome orders to hand back to the royal patrimony grants given or
confirmed by her in her lifetime. Many castles, strongholds of rebellious
nobles, were systematically demolished, and the Cortes of 1480 banned
the building of new ones, as well as the waging of private war. Alongside
these forceful means the Catholic kings developed a policy of attracting
noble families to the royal court. While they were gradually removed
from political offices in the government of the country, their places being
filled by letrados (jurists of humble birth), the nobles were allowed to
retain their privileges (e.g. exemption from torture and from imprisonment
for debt) and their titles — new titles even were granted. At the same

329

THE RENAISSANCE

time the nobles were encouraged to give their children an elaborate
education, often by Italian tutors, who thus helped to spread Renaissance
ideas in Castile. The royal family set the example; Isabella learnt Latin,
as well as her daughters, Isabella of Portugal, and Catherine, Henry VIII’s
queen.

Another important step towards the strengthening of the power of the
Crown and the royal patrimony was the annexation of the estates of
wealthy military orders. In 1476, when the Grand Master of the Knights
of Santiago died, a bull was obtained from Rome conferring the office
on King Ferdinand, agreement on the part of the pope being required on
account of the mixed nature, ecclesiastical and military, of the orders.
Ferdinand, however, with great circumspection, allowed a knight elected
by the order to take the office and waited till his death in 1499 to imple-
ment the papal concession in his own favour. Meanwhile he had assumed
the grandmastership ( Maestrazgos ) of the Orders of Calatrava (1487)
and Alcantara (1494). The elections to the grandmasterships had always
caused contention between the great nobles. The king’s assumption of
the grandmasterships of the three orders prevented quarrels and in
addition brought to the royal patrimony considerable revenues from
their estates. The papal bull in fact had awarded the revenues of the orders
to Queen Isabella, and in her will she bestowed them on Ferdinand.
Not until 1523 did another bull grant to Charles V in perpetuity the
offices of grandmaster and the management of the estates of the orders.
Unfortunately, financial pressure on Charles V was always heavy, and
about 1529 an opposite trend begins to appear, namely mortgaging,
selling and dismembering the estates of the orders and their revenues.
In 1519 the collection of all revenues from the orders was farmed to
Gutierrez de Madrid, himself a royal treasurer, for the sum of 133,000
ducats.

To keep order in the country districts, and incidentally to keep the
restless nobles in hand, the Catholic kings adapted an ancient institution,
the Hermandad (brotherhood). In the Middle Ages it had been a federation
of cities, with a council that met regularly, a seal and a militia, with a
set of rules covering the duties of its members, its working and functions,
punishment of crimes, and prosecution of offenders. It was in short a
regnum in regno. The sovereigns, dependent on the support of the cities,
as we have seen in the Cortes of 1480, had already in the Cortes of Madri-
gal (1476) obtained the reorganisation of the Hermandad under royal
control. An assembly of representatives of the towns and cities of the
kingdom of Castile laid down a constitution for the new Hermandad.
A Junta, or council, of provincial delegates was set up under the presi-
dency of a representative of the sovereigns. The Hermandad received
full power to prosecute and punish robbery, arson or rebellion against
the royal authority, crimes then removed from the jurisdiction of the

330

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

ordinary courts. The old armed forces of the Hermandad were revived
as a kind of rural constabulary. All towns had to pay tribute to maintain
the Hermandad and its forces, and within each town everyone, citizens,
clergy and nobles, had to make his contribution. Squadrons of archers
patrolled roads and the countryside, dealing ruthlessly with criminals.
Mutilation or death were the usual punishments. The nobles were bitterly
hostile, but their complaints went unheeded. The working of the Hermandad
was a complete success. It suppressed crime and disorder and protected
travellers and trade. The nobility desisted from the practices that had
brought Castile to anarchy. Above all, the royal power stood strengthened
and universally respected. In twenty years the Hermandad had achieved
its aims. An ordinance of 1498 suppressed its council or Junta and the
taxes for its upkeep. The severity of its punishments was mitigated, and
appeals from its decisions to the ordinary courts of justice were allowed.

After the sovereigns had used the cities against the nobility, they
proceeded to bring them too under the control of the Crown. The medieval
principle of municipal autonomy was a thing of the past by the fifteenth
century. The municipal councils were riddled with corruption, dominated
by persons who trafficked in municipal offices, which were bought, sold or
leased not only in the city where the dealer lived but in cities far afield
where his activities extended. This was the situation which Ferdinand and
Isabella found and which they strove to remedy. Redress was achieved
in suppressing these corrupt practices; unfortunately municipal freedom
was suppressed as well. Vacancies in municipal offices were now filled
not by election but by lot, the names being drawn out of a bag which
contained only the names of persons acceptable to the royal authori-
ties. Royal officials were now appointed to the municipal councils.
Foremost among them was the corregidor, appointed by the Crown from
1480 to the council of every city in Castile. Merriman described the
corregidores as the ‘omnicompetent servants of an absolute King’. They
had to keep a close watch on municipal finances, on the common lands
of the municipality, and to study the best method of increasing their
revenues. Relations between Moors and Christians, gambling, local tolls
and excise, the administration of justice, etc., all came under the corre-
gidores. Through them every man in the realm was brought under the
direct surveillance of the central power.

The cortes themselves lost most of their character as representative
national assemblies, even allowing for the fact that the cortes of Castile,
in contrast with those of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, had never
enjoyed much power either financial or legislative. Ferdinand and
Isabella summoned the cortes of Castile at irregular intervals: four times
before 1483 and twelve after 1497, the first four times because the
sovereigns needed them as allies against the nobility, as is shown by the
Cortes of 1476 and 1480 referred to above. But once the royal power

33i

THE RENAISSANCE

was absolute the ally was no longer needed. The fourteen years without
cortes (1483-97) show how little necessary they were by then. If they
were again summoned after 1497, it was only to recognise heirs to the
throne or to make grants for wars in Italy. None of the members of the
Castilian cortes sat in his own right. The king summoned whom he
liked, and when he liked, although traditionally certain persons would
expect to receive the summons. The nobles and clergy gradually ceased to
attend, since the cortes were summoned only to grant funds, and they were
exempt from taxation. There remained only thirty-six representatives of the
cities, two from each of eighteen cities — a figure, it has been said, which
was too large for a council but not large enough for a national assembly.

Relations between the Catholic kings and the Holy See were determined
by two principles : mutual support for political interests, and the surrender
of ecclesiastical affairs to the royal power in Spain and the Indies. Re-
lations were particularly friendly in the days of Alexander VI (1492-1503),
the Valencian Rodrigo Borja (or Borgia, in the Italian spelling), a period
of considerable Hispanic influence in Rome. King and pope understood
one another well and followed similar policies, which resulted in a
strengthening of both royal and papal power. With his bull Inter caetera
(3 May 1493) Alexander VI granted in perpetuity to the kings of Castile
all continents and islands to be discovered overseas not belonging to any
other Christian sovereign. Next day, by another bull, Eximiae devotionis,
a dividing line was drawn one hundred leagues to the west of the islands
of Cape Verde and the Azores to separate the discoveries of Castile and
Portugal. When the French Charles VIII sent his forces to Italy to conquer
Naples and threaten the papal states, Alexander VI, at the end of 1494,
conferred upon Ferdinand and Isabella the title of ‘the Catholic Kings’,
as a reward for their services to religion, covering a diplomatic move to
encourage Ferdinand in his efforts to form an alliance against the king of
France. The alliance, known as the League of Venice, was finally signed
(31 March 1495) between the Venetian republic, the Emperor Maximilian,
the duke of Milan, Ferdinand and the pope ‘ for the peace and tranquillity
of Italy, the welfare of all Christendom, the defence of the honour and
authority of the Holy See and the rights of the Holy Roman Empire
This was the beginning of the chain of events that brought the kingdom
of Naples once more under the king of Aragon.

The bulls of Alexander VI and Julius II left the ecclesiastical affairs of
the Indies almost entirely in the hands of the sovereigns. It was incumbent
upon the Crown to send missionaries and build churches; in return it
received all tithes (1501) and held the derecho de presentacion, the right
to submit to the pope nominations for bishoprics and all ecclesiastical
offices in Spanish America. Bishops designated by the Crown took
possession of their sees often before the pope’s confirmation. Thanks to
the regio patronato, the king was the immediate authority on ecclesiastical

332

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

matters in America. Only on one point was Rome adamant. Ferdinand
and Isabella petitioned for the right to nominate a supreme patriarch of
the Indies, with power to settle many affairs without recourse to Rome.
The dangers were obvious and the Holy See refused to yield. When in
1524, in the days of Charles V, Pope Clement VII appointed a patriarch
of the Indies, the title was only one of honour and carried no real power.

This regalian policy was consistently applied in the Hispanic kingdoms
themselves, tending in many respects, dogma apart, to the formation of a
sort of national church. Two main lines were followed in connection
with the clergy and the religious orders — submission and reform. The
great prelates, who had been as unruly as the great nobles, felt the conse-
quences of measures taken to keep the nobility well in hand. As a result
of the derecho de presentation gradually only prelates loyal to Ferdinand
and Isabella were appointed to vacant sees. After some discussion this
right was granted in 1482 by Sixtus IV, the same pope who had recognised
the new Inquisition and the annexation of the military orders.

The religious orders, and particularly the secular clergy, were no better
in Spain than in other countries during the period preceding the Reform-
ation. Pope Alexander VI in 1494 granted the Catholic Kings full
powers to reform all communities of nuns and friars in their kingdoms.
Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros was entrusted with the task. Jimenez
stands out as one of the most extraordinary men of this period. A man
of ardent zeal and unbounded energy, he combined in a strange fashion
the humility of a Franciscan and the strong will of a statesman. He was
the reformer of many orders and of the secular clergy themselves. For
their education and perfecting he founded the University of Alcala (1498),
and he twice ruled Castile as regent, in Ferdinand’s absence (1506-7), and
again on the death of the latter, pending the arrival of Charles from the
Netherlands (1516-17) on the death of Philip. From 1492 he was Isabella’s
confessor, but, great as his influence on the queen must have been, he
was not the sole inspirer of the policy of the Catholic Kings. Most
orders were then divided into two branches: the ‘observants’, who strictly
kept the original rules, and the ‘conventuals’, whose discipline had be-
come relaxed. Jimenez worked indefatigably to enforce on all the strict
observance of the rules. The Franciscans, Jimenez’s own order, were the
first to be reformed, the process being completed by 1506, and the
Dominicans, Benedictines and Hieronymites followed. These orders, parti-
cularly the Franciscans, grew to extraordinary numbers. From them came
most of the missionaries to the Indies. From among the Franciscans
and Dominicans a select group was formed, cultured and deeply religious,
in sympathy with Erasmus, whose ideas in later years influenced certain
aspects of the Counter-Reformation.

The Spanish sovereigns received considerable financial help from the
Church in their kingdoms. Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84), considering the

34 333 KCMH I

THE RENAISSANCE

campaign against Granada a crusade against the infidels, granted indul-
gences to the faithful making financial contributions(i482). The concession
continued with intermissions, even after the war with the Arabs had
ended. It was renewed for Charles V in his wars with the Turks, until
it became permanently established. Priests, ministros de la Cruzada,
visited every parish, urging the people to accept the benefits offered by
a bull granting them indulgences and the privilege of eating meat during
Lent, in exchange for a donation rated at 68 maravedis. The Cortes of
Castile (1518, 1520, 1525, 1548) complained of the methods used:
people were forced to attend church sometimes for two consecutive days;
they had to listen to endless sermons and they had to neglect their work,
until they agreed to buy an indulgence. The system was extended to all
the kingdoms in the peninsula and Italy. It was first used in America in
1523, though not definitely established until 1538.

During Ferdinand’s regency (1510-15)3 council ( Consejo de la Cruzada)
was established to fix the appropriate contribution for each bishopric and
collect it. As in the case of the estates of the military orders in the days
of Charles V, one finds the ubiquitous German bankers Fugger and
Welser (1530) and the Genoese Salvaggio and Lomellino (1538) in control
of the revenues of the crusade as surety for money advanced to the
Crown. Of the 68 maravedis paid one-fourth was retained by the Church,
and the remaining 51, after deducting collection expenses, went into the
royal treasury, whence it was used for any purpose except the non-
existent crusades. Everyone was expected to possess an indulgence.
An allocation among bishoprics (1523?) estimated at over 1,420,000 the
number of people under the Crown of Castile who were expected to have
one, though this figure probably referred to householders. The receipts
were estimated at 450,000 ducats in the years 1523-5.

The clergy paid a special contribution, the subsidio, agreed by Pope Leo X.
This tax was levied upon all clergy receiving rents from ecclesiastical
establishments and on all churches and monasteries (there were 470
monasteries in Castile in 1532). As usual, the collection of this tax was
often farmed to the Genoese bankers, Centurione and Grimaldo. The
subsidy of 1536 for arming twenty-two galleys against the Turks was
estimated to yield about 193,000 ducats.

The Inquisition is the most representative institution of the union of
political and religious power in the hands of the Catholic kings. To give
it its proper place in the royal plans for the reorganisation of the country,
it is useful to remember that the bull establishing it to deal with converted
Jews in 1478 came between the bull for the annexation of the estates of
the military orders to the Crown in 1476 and the act passed in the Cortes
of 1480 for the restitution to the royal patrimony of mer cedes granted to
the nobility. Given the problems which were then exercising the royal

334

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

minds, it seems, therefore, that the mission of the Inquisition was not
intended to be purely spiritual. If its purpose was to be strictly religious,
the Church would have been the competent authority, as it had been in
the medieval inquisition, and it would have been difficult to account for
Ferdinand and Isabella’s insistence upon wresting control from the pope.

The Jewish problem had been serious in Castile since the terrible
pogroms of 1391. What made it more acute during the fifteenth century
was the number of converted Jews or new Christians who occupied
prominent positions in the country but were trusted neither by their own
brethren nor by the Christians, who accused them of keeping the old
faith under cover of the new. To maintain the purity of their faith severe
measures were taken in the synagogues against renegades. On the other
hand, many conversos, in order to justify and defend themselves in the
eyes of the Christians, became violently anti-Semitic. From Jews and
conversos came eminent writers and physicians and most of the merchants.
Many noble families had entrusted Jews with the management of their
estates, and not a few bishops followed their example, employing Jews
for the collection of their diocesan revenues. Kings had also farmed out
their taxes, minting, dues, trading licences, salt monopolies, etc., to the
most prominent Jewish families of Castile. Their positions had thus made
the Jews unpopular in many quarters, while they must have been very
much in the royal mind when the sovereigns were reorganising the ad-
ministration. This does not mean that the Catholic Kings had not been
uninfluenced by religious motives — this would have been unlikely, living
in those times and surrounded by ecclesiastics — or by the desire to unify
the people or settle the social problem of the conversos and the rising tide
of anti-Semitism.

Negotiations ably conducted by Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (the future
Alexander VI) obtained from Sixtus IV a bull establishing the Inquisition
(November 1478) in accordance with the king’s desire. In the medieval
inquisition in France and in Aragon the inquisitors had been subject to
the bishop’s authority ; in the new one they were subject to the king. It was,
in fact, a royal inquisition of the Crown of Castile. Gradually the Crown
came to supervise the appointment of inquisitors and instructions issued
by them to control and regulate salaries, and to be able to command that
confiscations should be paid into the royal treasury. The Inquisition was
not established in practice until 1480, an indication that it had met with
resistance.

Panic and a general flight of conversos were the first results of the In-
quisition in Seville, where it began to operate ruthlessly in the autumn
of 1480. Reports reached Rome, and Sixtus IV, realising the dangers,
withdrew his previous concession (January-April 1482). He now tried
to bring the Inquisition back to the medieval model; he appointed the
inquisitors himself and refused Ferdinand’s petition to introduce his

335

THE RENAISSANCE

royal Inquisition into the kingdom of Aragon. Moreover, deploring excesses
committed through greed of gain, the pope granted a general pardon to
corner sos and then laid down the inquisitorial procedure: this had to be
in public and with a right of appeal to the Holy See. Ferdinand replied
with an angry letter (i 3 May 1482) : he had been told of the pope’s decision
but he could not believe it to be true, because it was the duty of His
Holiness to conduct the Inquisition in a proper manner ; and even if the
conversos had really been given these concessions by the pope, he was
not prepared to accept them. He insisted, therefore, that the Inquisition
should be established secundum beneplacitum et voluntatem meam in his
Regnis et terris meis.

These negotiations with Sixtus IV should be viewed in relation to others
on Italian affairs. The Turks had taken Otranto in 1480, and Ferdinand
was the chief promoter of the league that expelled them in the following
year. But the situation was quite different in 1482, when Venice was
opposed to Ercole d’Este, duke of Ferrara, son-in-law of King Ferrante
of Naples and a cousin of Ferdinand the Catholic. Sixtus IV not only
supported Venice, which on 2 May attacked Ferrara and invaded it in
the summer, but solicited the aid of Louis XI, offering him in return
support for his claims on Naples against the house of Aragon. Ferrante
turned to Ferdinand, but the latter, though not ready to make a military
expedition abroad, threatened Venice with commercial war and the pope
with armed intervention against the Papal States. The pope was so daunted
that he promptly moved to the side of Naples and Ferrara. Abandoned
by the end of the year by all her allies except Genoa, Venice still tried to
get the French to intervene. The volte face of Sixtus IV in Italian affairs
under Ferdinand’s threat probably also explains his change in the matter
of the Inquisition. On 10 October 1482 the pope capitulated completely
to the king. On 23 February 1483 he wrote to Isabella that a commission
of cardinals was studying her petition that she and her husband should
be quite free to appoint inquisitors and a judge of appeal: he assured
her that he had never entertained any suspicion that this affair had been
prompted by any bonorum temporalium cupiditate. It is nevertheless to
be noted that in Spain, particularly in Aragon, witnesses in cases before
the Inquisition repeatedly stated or reported the belief that its purpose
was to deprive the accused of their wealth, and they blamed Isabella
rather than Ferdinand.

Ferdinand’s attempts to introduce the Inquisition into Aragon met
with strong opposition. In Aragon itself it culminated in the murder of
the inquisitor, Pedro de Arbues, in the cathedral of Saragossa (1485),
an outrage that naturally led to the prosecution of the leading Jewish
families, though those nearer to the king escaped almost unscathed. In
Catalonia all the authorities, lay and ecclesiastical, including the members
of the old inquisition, opposed Ferdinand and his new Inquisition for

336

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

three years (1484-7). There was something repugnant about the institution
to the Catalan democratic tradition. Meanwhile Jewish and converso
merchants escaped to France with their goods and capital, a serious blow
to Catalan trade. But in face of the hostility of Rome and the inflexible
determination of Ferdinand the Catalans had to surrender. The Inquisition
was also introduced into Sicily, Sardinia, and the American colonies.
It was the only institution that, ruled from a council sitting at the monarch’s
elbow, was able to exercise its authority over all the territories of the
monarchy.

Fray Thomas de Torquemada was appointed inquisitor-general for
Castile by the papal bull of 2 August 1483, and for the Crown of Aragon
on 17 October. His successor Diego de Deza, archbishop of Seville, was
appointed for Castile (1498) by Ferdinand and Isabella, and later con-
firmed by the pope. Nine months later he was appointed inquisitor-
general for the Crown of Aragon. On the death of Isabella, when the
two Crowns separated, each acquired its own inquisition and inquisitor.
Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, the future Pope Adrian VI, became once
more the common inquisitor (1518). When Sixtus IV finally recognised
the royal Inquisition (1483) the royal council, or rather Consejo de
Castilla, had already been organised. Another council for the Inquisition
of Castile was set up on the same model, and later a council for the
Inquisition of Aragon, although the two often had a common president.
Both later joined the Consejo de la Santa y Suprema Inquisicion.

The outcome of the Jewish problem was the final expulsion of the
Jews (1492). This measure was not a sudden step. As early as 1480
Isabella had intended to expel the Jews from Andalusia. When the
Inquisition got into its stride, local expulsions were ordered : Jews were
expelled from the bishoprics of Seville and Cordoba (1 January 1483);
no Jews could remain more than three days in Cuenca ( 1 2 December 1 483) ;
all young Jews were expelled from Burgos (March i486); no Jew might
spend the night in Bilbao (12 August 1490); and so forth. These measures
were taken during the campaign against Granada, and prominent Jews
like Abrevanel and Abraham Seneor had contracts to supply the Christian
army. But after the fall of Granada the Jews were no longer needed.
Obviously religious fanaticism played its part in the expulsion ordered
three months later (30 March 1492) : the Muhammadans had been expelled,
it was now the turn of the Jews. A similar event took place some years
later, when, as thanksgiving for his victory at Pavia against the French
(1525), Charles V expelled all the Jews who had remained in Naples.
Probably some 35,000 families left the kingdoms of Castile: few quitted
Catalonia, as there were not many left there. It is not their numbers
that matter; it is the suffering and misery inflicted on human beings. On
the other hand through the Inquisition, through the expulsion of the Jews
and later of the Moslems, the religious unity of Spain was preserved.

337

THE RENAISSANCE

While she thus acquired the role of champion of the Roman Catholic
Church, she had to pay a heavy price in other directions. The expulsion
of the Jews, the only citizens with economic ability, sealed the fate of the
Castilian empire before it was bom. The Inquisition has to be judged not
only on what it did in the way of persecution but on what it prevented
being done, at a time when the Renaissance was spreading the principle
of free discussion which fostered the development of science and thought.

To Ferdinand is due the inception of the system of councils which has
been considered typical of the government of the Habsburg monarchy. The
medieval royal council of the kings of Castile was modified in the Cortes
of Madrigal (1476) and received its final reorganisation in those of Toledo
(1480). The radical changes were: the nobles were superseded by letrados
or jurists (one prelate, three nobles and eight or nine lawyers) ; it became
a permanent body sitting in the royal court. In other words, from being
a council of the nobility for advising the king, it became a bureaucratic
body of civil servants for the execution of the royal policy.

Ferdinand also found himself with the old royal council of the Crown
of Aragon, well organised in the days of Peter IV of Aragon, with the
chancery, the treasury, and the office of the royal chamberlain. After
some temporary arrangements the council was reorganised in 1494. It
had a vice-chancellor at its head, five regents or councillors (usually
doctors of law), a prothonotary as head of the chancery, and his lieutenant,
the advocate of the fisc, representing public or Crown interests, a
treasurer-general who had no vote on matters of justice, and four secre-
taries, each at the head of an office to deal with the affairs of Aragon,
Valencia, Catalonia and the Italian territories respectively. The vice-
chancellor and the five regents had to be natives, two from each of the
three peninsular provinces of Aragon. The treasurer-general need not be
a national, and royal policy later was to appoint a Castilian. Other
councils were organised, to which reference has already been made:
the council of the Hermandad, founded in 1476 and lasting only until
1498; the council of finance (1480 in its embryonic form, but not a
fully fledged council until much later); the council of the Inquisition
(1483); and the council of the military orders (1489).

Of these councils those of Castile, Aragon and the Inquisition were
supremos, that is, they were not subordinate to any other or to any
authority except the king. The councils of the Indies and Italy were later
added to this category. The complicated problems of precedence were
meticulously discussed and determined: the councils of Castile and
Aragon were of equal status and in processions walked to right and left
of the king; the council of the Inquisition followed immediately behind
him, and then came the other councils. The councils advised the king on
policy regarding their respective countries or jurisdictions, proposed their

338

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

nominees for appointment as royal officials, made decisions subject to
the king’s approval, on matters of royal government as distinct from that
of the national government of the country, and also acted as courts of
legal appeal.

The finances, considered as part of the patrimony of the sovereign
rather than as the resources of the country, were managed by the Conta-
dores Mayores and the Contadores de Cuentas. The system persisted until
the return of Charles to Spain after the defeat of the Comuneros. He then
appointed Henry of Nassau, who had been chef et surintendant des
finances in the Netherlands, to control the Castilian Contadurias at the
head of a committee of six members (1523). Though the Emperor Charles
referred to this body as a ‘finance council’, the name did not exist officially
in Castilian legislation prior to 1568. In the period of Ferdinand’s regency
a group of men from the Contadurias was put in charge of the revenue of
the Crusade. From this evolved the Consejo de la Cruzada.

In the days of Ferdinand and Isabella the royal council of Castile also
dealt with the affairs of the Indies. It seems that in the early days of Charles
a sort of committee within the council of Castile specialised in Indian
affairs ; at least there is a vague reference to ‘ those of the Indies ’ in a paper
contemporary with the Cortes of Corunna (1520). But the council of
the Indies as such did not appear until 1524.

We may turn from the internal administration of the Hispanic kingdoms
to a wider field and glance briefly at Ferdinand’s diplomatic activities.
The culmination of years of intrigue, the harvest from seeds sown in
many fields, only took place in the last period of his life, after the
queen’s death and when he was only regent of Castile, although king of
Aragon.

Most of Ferdinand’s international activities were a development of the
Catalan-Aragonese diplomacy of previous centuries. His Mediterranean
policy of relations with North Africa and opposition to the Turks was
the line followed of old . Intervention in Italy and conflict there with French
interests had begun with the Catalan landing in Sicily in 1281, and these
remained the two chief problems in Ferdinand’s international relations.
France was more formidable than the Italian States, and most of Ferdi-
nand’s diplomatic moves aimed at the encirclement of France : the alliances
and marriages of his daughters with the English king and the emperor’s
son are examples of this. Castile had led a more isolated existence
throughout the Middle Ages, and her only important contribution to
foreign policy was her relations with Portugal.

During the reign and after the defeat of King Alfonso V of Portugal
(1476 and 1479), the relationship between the two kingdoms was one of
friendship, based chiefly on marriage alliances. Isabella, Ferdinand’s
eldest daughter, was married first (1490) to Alfonso, grandson of the

339

THE RENAISSANCE

defeated king, and after his death to Manuel, duke of Bejar (1497),
who had become king. Isabella died in childbirth, and her baby son, who
might have united the Crowns of Aragon, Castile and Portugal, died two
years later (20 July 1500). Meanwhile Prince John, the only son of the
Catholic kings, husband of Margaret, the Emperor Maximilian’s daughter,
had also died (1497), and shortly afterwards his wife was delivered of a
stillborn child. The only hope of succession was now in the marriage of
the king’s daughter Juana the Mad with the Emperor’s son, Archduke
Philip the Handsome. This, however, made it likely that the Hispanic
kingdoms and their possessions would pass to a foreign prince, a prospect
not relished by the Catholic kings, but destined nevertheless to be realised.
So when Manuel, still bent upon the union of the whole peninsula,
approached Ferdinand and Isabella for the hand of their fourth daughter,
Maria, the petition was granted (October 1500). And when Maria died
(1517) he again married into the Spanish royal family, this time Eleanor,
the elder daughter of Juana and Philip, and sister of Charles V. Maria’s
son John III, the Portuguese king, never fulfilled his father’s constant
ambition, but all these marriages and later ones had the final result of
placing Philip II in a strong position to claim the throne of Portugal.

These friendly relations with Portugal involved respect for the agreement
of Alcagovas (4 September 1479) by which Alfonso V had renounced
his claim to Castile and brought about a division of the African and
Atlantic possessions of both kingdoms. While the Canary Isles were
recognised as Castile’s, Portugal was recognised in the islands of Cape
Verde, Madeira and the Azores, and in the territories of Fez and Guinea
in Africa. In 1494, two years after the conquest of Granada, the pope
granted the Muhammadan territories in North Africa east of the kingdom
of Fez to the Catholic Kings. During the early period of Ferdinand’s
rule as administrator of Castile (1506-11) expeditions were launched
against North Africa. Penon de la Gomera was conquered (1508) and
later (1509-10) Oran, Bugia, Tripoli, Tenes and Algiers. These were
allotted to the Crown of Aragon and to Catalan trade. Then at the
General Cortes of the confederation (Monzon, 1510) a crusade to Egypt
and Jerusalem was discussed for which the states of the Crown of
Aragon voted five hundred thousand pounds.

Mediterranean relations had brought Ferdinand into opposition with
the Turks, separated from the territories of Naples only by the Straits of
Otranto. Their common enmity against him was finally to bring the
French and the Turks into an alliance, to the scandal of Christianity.

While the Castilian medieval tradition had on the whole been one of
friendship with France, a contrary Catalan tradition now became, under
Ferdinand, the policy of all his kingdoms. With France he wanted first
to settle accounts for her annexation of the Catalan counties of Roussillon
and Cerdagne. John II, Ferdinand’s father, in his financial difficulties

340

THE HISPANIC KINGDOMS

during the Catalan Revolution, had pawned those counties to Louis XI
for 300,ooocrowns, and when he could not pay, the French king foreclosed.
When Charles VIII of France became involved in war in Brittany (1485—
91), Ferdinand began to get him into his toils, inducing the Emperor Maxi-
milian and Henry VII of England to take sides against him. In the spring
of 1488 the English king proposed a close alliance between the two
countries, and the marriage of his eldest son Arthur to Catherine, the
daughter of the Catholic kings. Opposition to France was one of Ferdi-
nand’s conditions for acceptance.

The war with Brittany passed without making any considerable military
demands upon the confederates. But, conscious of how he was encircled,
Charles VIII when planning his expedition against Naples first tried to
break the circle by conciliating Ferdinand with the return of the counties
of Roussillon and Cerdagne (Treaty of Barcelona, 1493) and inducing
him to consider himself the enemy of all those at war with France.
Obviously Ferdinand could not comply with this condition if Charles
really wanted to seize Naples. So he began to forge another alliance
against the French king — the League of Venice, the partners in which were
the Republic of Venice, himself, Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo de Borgia),
the Emperor Maximilian, the duke of Milan and his cousin Ferrante, the
dethroned king of Naples (1495). Ferdinand’s plans were successful. His
army defended and occupied Naples, and Charles VIII withdrew. But then
Ferrante died and was succeeded by his old and weak uncle Federigo
(1496). Ferdinand saw an opportunity to recover the kingdom of Naples,
which his own uncle Alfonso V had not included with Sicily and the
Crown of Aragon in his will in favour of John II. His first move was to
woo the French king, encircled as he was by England and the Empire.
In the winter of 1496 to 1497 a double marriage linked the royal and the
imperial families: Princess Juana was married to the Archduke Philip
(October 1496), and the Archduchess Margaret to Prince Juan (April 1497).
Meanwhile negotiations for the marriage of the prince of Wales, Arthur,
to Princess Catherine were renewed.

Charles VIII therefore welcomed a suspension of hostilities in Italy,
and then by means of secret negotiations he was inveigled into a plan of
Ferdinand’s for the partition of Naples between them (1497). The plan
was confirmed by his successor, Louis XII (1498). War between Venice
and the Turks gave Ferdinand a pretext for sending his army to the vicinity
of Naples (1500). King Federigo had appealed in vain to Ferdinand for
help, and now, realising where the danger came from, rashly allied himself
with the Turks. Here was the excuse Ferdinand had been waiting for.
His army and the French king’s invaded the kingdom of Naples (1501-2)
and they divided it between them. The final act of the drama was easy
to foresee: quarrels between the victors. Ferdinand again applied his
diplomacy, to secure at least the neutrality of the Empire, Venice and the

341

THE RENAISSANCE

Holy See; the rest was accomplished by force of arms. The French were
defeated and had to recognise in a treaty (March 1504) Ferdinand’s posses-
sion of Naples.

Ferdinand’s diplomacy was supple enough to allow him to conciliate
the French after fooling or defeating them, and to maintain the English
connection. After Isabella’s death he had to protect himself in face of
Philip’s ambitions and possible threats from the Empire, and this drew
him closer to France. When the clouds passed, his next care was to recover
the Adriatic ports of the kingdom of Naples, which had remained in the
power of Venice. Taking advantage of the rivalry of other Powers against
Venice, he entered into a new alliance — the League of Cambrai (1508)
— with Pope Julius II, Florence, the emperor, Louis XII and himself. The
Adriatic ports were easily retaken. France’s position in North Italy was
now becoming too strong for the comfort of the old allies. Besides,
Ferdinand was now well established as regent of Castile and no longer
needed France. The result was the Holy League against France (151 1-13),
between Venice, the pope, the emperor, Ferdinand, and his son-in-law
Henry VIII. As usual Ferdinand managed to choose the winning side.
He did not obtain any more advantages in Italy, but he succeeded in
manoeuvring the French into a position that aided him in his conquest of
Navarre. At the end of his life Ferdinand was still able to reinforce the
English alliance (October 1515) directed against Francis I of France.
This policy had borne fruit in the war of Brittany and, more particularly,
in the moves for the conquest of Navarre. Charles V maintained the
alliance, which culminated in the marriage of Philip and Mary Tudor.
After that the two countries parted company.

Friendship with the Empire, also originally intended as a move against
France, brought such developments for Spain as Ferdinand could never
have foreseen. His heir, Charles, was to be in a position in both hemi-
spheres that was entirely without precedent. The isolated Castile of the
Middle Ages now rose to world power and unparalleled splendour. But
at the same time insoluble problems accumulated around her, making
exhausting demands on her resources and forcing her to endless sacrifices.
Charles reaped the harvest sown by Ferdinand. But the old king, though
it was he who laid the foundations of the empire, could scarcely have
visualised its later dimensions. At the time of Charles’s accession and
his early election as emperor, people were fortunate in being able to see
only the brighter aspects of the future.

342

CHAPTER XII

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

W ithin twenty years of Charles VIII’s invasion, Italians had
begun to speak regretfully of the happy days which preceded the
coming of the French. They looked back on the years before
1494 as an age of peace and prosperity, when endless opportunities were
open to men of talent, and when life in court and city was marked by a
round of novel and refined pleasures. Their view of the past was nostalgic,
yet the second half of the fifteenth century may rightly be considered the
heyday of Italian civilisation. During the forty years which lay between
the Peace of Lodi (1454) and the French invasion, the rulers of Italy had
done much to establish peace and order within their dominions and friendly
relations with their neighbours. Quarrels between the various states were
of less significance than the common interests which united them. Petty
wars did not place serious hindrances in the way of the pursuit of wealth
or the cultivation of the arts. Although the challenge to Italy’s commercial
supremacy was already formidable, the merchants had money to spend
on pictures, books and building, whilst the princes used their earnings as
mercenary captains to make their capitals centres of the art and learning
of the Renaissance. The individual contribution to civilisation made by
each state at a time when it was still independent and at peace bore fruit
in the splendours of the early sixteenth century. A reverse side of the
picture is the growing interest shown by foreign Powers in Italian affairs.
The claims of the houses of Anjou and Orleans to Naples and Milan were
frequently brought into prominence through the evil habit contracted
by Italian rulers of seeking French aid in their own quarrels. The rapid
development of Spain as a Mediterranean Power was a danger to Italian
independence as yet not fully realised. Imperial suzerainty over northern
and central Italy remained a factor in politics which gained practical
significance from the tension between Venice and the house of Austria
with regard to Italy’s eastern frontiers. Meanwhile a steady stream of
seekers after learning crossed the Alps, numbering among them not only
poor scholars, but men of rank and influence in their own countries. Other
visitors came as diplomatic agents to the chief courts or on commercial
business. All helped to create in their own countries an impression of
Italy as a treasure-house of the arts, rich yet divided and militarily weak —
a prize worth winning, and not impossible of attainment.

The first half of the fifteenth century in Italy had been a period of
warfare, expansion and consolidation from which had emerged five more
or less equal Powers. Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papacy and Naples

343

THE RENAISSANCE

varied considerably in size and character, but the balance of their political
influence was roughly maintained. Out of a collection of cities, each with
a strong separatist tradition, the Visconti dukes of Milan had created a
single state held together by solid benefits arising from an efficient central
government. After the death of the last Visconti (1447) an experiment in
republicanism ended in failure, and Francesco Sforza, the leading con -
dottiere of the day, became duke of Milan. His claim rested less on his
marriage with Visconti’s illegitimate daughter than on the will of the
citizens who proclaimed him duke, and on the recognition by the Italian
Powers that a continuation of the Visconti system was in the general interest.
A strong and united duchy facing the chief passes between France
and Italy was a bulwark against foreign invasion, and at the same time a
check on the territorial expansion of Venice. With the Peace of Lodi,
which left Cremona, a long-standing object of Venetian ambition, in
Milanese hands, Sforza’s fighting days were over. He retained, however,
a military organisation superior to that of any other Italian state save
possibly Naples. The cavalry of the ducal household, with a force of
infantry and some artillery, formed the nucleus of a standing army, whilst
the condottieri were for the most part relatives and vassals, raising their
companies locally, and recognising Milan as their patria. Milan prospered
under her Sforza dukes. The agricultural resources of the duchy were
developed by irrigation, and the planting of mulberries fostered the rapidly
expanding silk industry. Building went on at the two chief monuments
of the Visconti era, the Duomo of Milan and the Certosa of Pavia. To
them were added the Castello Sforzesco and Francesco Sforza’s great
hospital in Milan, as well as churches and public buildings throughout
the dominion. Having failed to obtain investiture with the duchy from
the Emperor, the Sforza were at pains to cultivate the good-will of the
people, the source of their title to rule. There was an undercurrent of
discontent amongst an opposition which called itself Guelf, but the duchy
remained for the most part united and at peace until Lodovico Sforza
became the guardian of his nephew Gian Galeazzo. With his assumption
of power (1480) Milan entered upon the period of her greatest glory and
also upon the beginning of her troubles.

The acquisitions of Venice on the Italian mainland during the first half
of the fifteenth century had broken down her old isolation. With frontiers
stretching from the Alps to the Po, and from the Adda to the Isonzo, she
became a vital factor in Italian politics. Machiavelli ascribes her decline
to the mainland dominions which forced her to add hired condottieri to
armed forces hitherto consisting of a navy manned by her own citizens.
In fact, both in the handling of her captains and in the government of
her subject cities she was both skilful and successful. The condottieri
respected an employer who was stern but just, and punctual in payment,
and for the most part they served her loyally. Levies from the subject

344

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

cities provided an infantry which acquitted itself with credit against the
armies of the League of Cambrai. Venice prided herself on treating the
cities of her territory as colleagues rather than as subjects. The lower
classes in particular benefited by the high standard of Venetian justice
and by light taxation, raised indirectly on the purchase price of goods
imported from the East. If the nobles resented the presence of the Venetian
governors in cities where they themselves claimed the first place, they too
recognised the advantages of Venetian rule, and acquiesced in it. In
Venice itself, the monopoly of political power enjoyed by the nobility
gave them exceptional opportunities for advancement. Yet wealth was
spread evenly among the dominant class, as government control prevented
any single family from amassing a great fortune. The non-nobles found
an outlet for their administrative activities in the management of their
own trade guilds, and through their employment in the civil service. It
was the policy of the government to protect the interest of every class,
from the merchant and the industrialist to the workers in the state arsenal
and the rowers in the galleys. The citizens on their side were bred in a
tradition which regarded the republic of St Mark as the greatest which
the world had ever seen, save for that of Rome, and which set the good
of the State above that of the individual. Venice’s chief weakness lay in
the jealousy and suspicion which she aroused among her neighbours.
A new-comer on the Italian mainland, her gains were made at the expense
of other Powers. Pope, Emperor, Milan, Mantua, and Ferrara were all
the poorer for her advance and all feared her unabated greed for territory.
Her overseas interests and her struggle with the Turks made her reluctant
to join Italian combinations, and she acquired a reputation for selfish
absorption in her own affairs. Her very efficiency added to her unpopularity
with states less practised in the art of goverment. At this time rivalry
with the Turks was weakening her hold on the Levant and endangering
the safe passage of her merchant ships, whilst with the discovery of the
Cape route to India a mortal blow to her monopoly of the spice trade
was looming on the horizon. Nevertheless, when Philippe de Commynes
visited her in 1494 she was to outward appearance at the height of her
prosperity, a city of splendid buildings and lavish entertainment, wise in
government and strong in the unity of her citizens.

During the ascendancy of the early Medici (1434-94) the government
of Florence was skilfully adapted to the character and ideals of her citizens.
All were united in their devotion to the republic, yet such was the rivalry
between classes and families that popular government failed to function
effectively. The dominant class in the city was composed of members of
the greater guilds ( arti maggiori), merchants associated with the textile
industry, having commercial interests throughout Europe. Through then-
possession of seven out of nine places in the chief magistracy ( signoria ),
they were in a position to control Florentine policy. They failed to do so

345

THE RENAISSANCE

owing to their own quarrels, which kept the government weak and divided,
and provided opportunities for the less favoured classes to air their
discontents. The Medici, whilst remaining in law private citizens, gave to
the government the element of strength and continuity which it had hitherto
lacked. Certain changes in the constitution facilitated their control over
the State. The abandonment of election by lot in favour of appointment
by a select committee, in the bi-monthly elections of the signoria, went
far to secure that the chief magistracy was always composed of their
friends. The institution in 1480 of a Council of Seventy, with functions
which included choosing from among their own number the committees
dealing with finance and foreign affairs, marked a further concentration
of power in the hands of a ring of Mediceans. Important as were these
changes, they depended for their efficacy upon the support of a substantial
proportion of the ruling class which willingly accepted the leadership of
first Cosimo, then Piero and then Lorenzo de’ Medici. Their supremacy
was, in fact, popular with the majority of citizens. Association with the
great banking firm proved profitable to the merchants. An abundant food
supply in the city, money freely spent for charitable purposes, and gaieties
in which all shared, kept the lower classes content. Scholars and artists
benefited by generous patronage, and the Medici palace became a treasure
house which visitors from many lands came to admire. Owing to their
extensive banking connections, and their genius for diplomacy, the
Medici raised Florence to a position of influence in striking contrast with
her military weakness. Lorenzo in his later years became the guardian
of the peace of Italy, to whom other Powers looked for help and counsel.
He was the friend and equal of princes, yet in Florence he had learned
from his childhood to speak, write and act as a citizen and servant of the
republic. The title of the Medici to rule was that they enhanced the fame
of Florence and preserved, at least in name, her liberty, but from first to
last their position was precarious.

From the time of the return of Martin V to Rome after the ending of
the Great Schism, the aim of the Papacy had been to bring all Italian
territory subject to papal suzerainty under its direct rule. In fulfilment of
this purpose it encountered opposition from many quarters. The city of
Rome remained republican at heart, even while it recognised the prestige
which it gained as the seat of the Papacy. The great Roman families, with
representatives in the college of cardinals, houses in the city, and vast
estates outside, had abundant opportunities to hamper papal policy, and
did not fail to use them. Cities such as Perugia and Bologna, and despots
ruling as Vicars of the Church in Romagna were all but independent. Papal
suzerainty over Naples was little more than a useful weapon in the hands
of malcontent Neapolitan barons or rival claimants to the throne. For
the extension of their authority the popes depended largely on their own
relatives, whether clerics whom they made cardinals, or laymen on whom

346

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

they bestowed lands and offices. Sixtus IV, in particular, made nepotism
a fine art. Riario and della Rovere nephews were created cardinals, or
made lords of cities. Girolamo Riario at one time came near to mastering
all Romagna, and even aspired to the conquest of Ferrara. These designs
were thwarted by the consistent opposition of the major Italian Powers,
whose interest it was to retain their own influence in Romagna by acting
as the patrons of the local rulers. In spite of all these hindrances, the
spiritual authority of the Papacy continued to favour the development of
the temporal power. Italian rulers, half-pagan and strongly anti-clerical,
were nevertheless conscious of the evil effect of interdict and excommuni-
cation on their none too secure hold over their subjects. Despots and
republics within the states of the Church had no thought of repudiating
papal suzerainty; their aim always was to make a settlement with the
Papacy, which would guarantee as far as possible their stability and
freedom of action. Thus the papal claims remained intact, awaiting the
opportunity for their assertion.

Naples in the fifteenth century was still a feudal kingdom, bearing the
marks of the organisation imposed on it by its Norman conquerors. It
was a land of great estates held by nobles of French, Spanish and Italian
origin, whose aim was to live as little kings within their own dominions,
independently of the monarchy. Its two outstanding rulers of the century,
Alfonso and Ferrante of Aragon, did their utmost to increase monarchical
power. Alfonso claimed the throne on the death of Joanna II (1435), but
it took him seven years to establish his authority. He and his successor
reorganised the finances, increased trade with the help of Florentine
capital, and imposed heavy taxes. Opposition to their harsh rule was
relentlessly crushed and rebellious barons were punished by death,
imprisonment or exile. Alfonso (d. 1458) was a typical Renaissance
prince, a builder and a lover of learning, who filled his court with men of
talent from northern and central Italy. Ferrante (d. 1494) followed his
father’s example, less from personal taste than from his appreciation of
the political value of patronage of the arts. Being illegitimate, he could
lay no claim to Sicily, which on his father’s death passed with the Crown
of Aragon to his uncle John. Naples was won only after a long struggle
with the French claimant, Rene of Anjou. With a kingdom confined to
the mainland of Italy, his heir married to a Sforza, and his daughter to
the duke of Ferrara, he entered the family circle of Italian princes.
Naples under her Aragonese kings tended to be a disturbing element in
Italian politics. There was constant friction with the Papacy over the
question of suzerainty. Ferrante refused to add tribute to the white
palfrey which he presented annually to the pope in token of his vassalage.
He was the traditional ally of the Roman nobles, whilst the pope espoused
the cause of the oppressed Neapolitan baronage. Ferrante’s warlike and
ambitious son, Alfonso duke of Calabria, seized every opportunity to

347

THE RENAISSANCE

extend his power in Italy and he did not forget that his grandfather had
been named by Filippo Maria Visconti as his successor in Milan. Venice
and Naples were rivals in the Adriatic, where the former strove to obtain
possession of some Apulian ports. These local quarrels were an incentive
to the external enemies of the Aragonese dynasty. Invitations to the
Angevin princes to press their claims were made by both Venice and the
Papacy, whilst the Angevin party in Naples and in exile never ceased to
urge the coming of the French. The kings of Aragon were for the time
being fully occupied in Spanish affairs, but the hope of uniting the island
and the mainland parts of the old Sicilian kingdom made them prompt
to take advantage of the difficulties of their cousins in Naples. In August
1480 Turkish forces occupied Otranto and Ferrante appealed in vain to
the Italian Powers for help in their ejection. The danger passed with the
death of Mehemmed II in the following year, but it had afforded an alarming
example of Italian vulnerability.

Chief among the smaller states was Ferrara, ruled over by the house
of Este, which also held the imperial fief of Modena. Ferrara lay within
the states of the Church, and, although Borso d’Este received investiture
as duke in 1471, the popes did not abandon their aim of bringing the city
under their direct control. Venice also tried to extend her territory at
Ferrara’s expense. In the face of this double threat the Este looked for
protection to Milan, and continued to do so when the duchy fell to the
French. Ferrara owed her continued independence not only to her allies
but also to the long-standing and popular rule of the house of Este.
A marquis of Este became lord of Ferrara at the close of the twelfth
century and his successors remained there for four hundred years. In
comparison with this ancient race of rulers the Sforza and the Medici
were upstarts. It was the Este who set the tone of Italian society in which
the traditions of chivalry mingled with those of a free city, and public
ceremonies were flavoured with classical culture. The court of Ferrara
was a worthy setting for the work of Ariosto, the supreme poet of the
Renaissance. Mantua was a small and poor state, a prey to the ambitions
of its powerful neighbours, Milan and Venice. It was able to maintain
itself owing to its strong position, amid marshes and lakes on the river
Mincio, and to the fighting qualities of its Gonzaga lords. In 1403 the
reigning lord had been created marquis of Mantua by the Emperor
Wenzel, and the connection with the Empire was strengthened by the
marriage of two of his successors to members of German princely families.
The policy of the Gonzaga was determined by their profession as mercenary
captains. They fought at various times in the service of the chief Italian
states, and their earnings enabled them to transform their castle in Mantua
into a vast Renaissance palace, to which successive generations added
new features. The Gonzaga were intimately associated with the Monte-
feltro dukes of Urbino. Friendship between the two families began when

348

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

Federigo da Montefeltro came to Mantua as a pupil in the school of
Vittorino da Feltre, and was cemented by marriage alliances. Federigo
is an outstanding example of the soldier-scholar of his times. He founded
a great library and built a palace at Urbino which during the foreign
invasions became a place of refuge for more than one exiled family, and
the scene of the discussions on the doctrine of courtesy embodied in
Castiglione’s 11 Cortegiano. Owing to a marriage arranged by Sixtus IV,
the duchy of Urbino passed on the death of Federigo’s son to the della
Rovere family. Bologna in the latter part of the fifteenth century was still
a republic, where, in theory, the papal legate shared with the city magis-
trates in the government. In fact the real power lay with Giovanni
Bentivoglio who, as first citizen, was able to impose his will on the republic,
and to reduce the legate’s authority to a shadow. Bentivoglio was a
condottiere of Milan, and with Milanese support did much to maintain
the cities of Romagna in freedom under their native lords in defiance of
the papal claims. The palace which he built was as splendid as that of
Mantua or Urbino; it was razed to the ground by his enemies after
Julius II took possession of Bologna. Perugia and Siena followed the
fashion of the times in placing the government of the republic in the
hands of a leading citizen family, as the surest guarantee of their peace
and independence. All these lesser states had their local schools of painting,
and their special literary interests; all contributed to the rich variety of
Italian civilisation ; all were effective obstacles to Italian unity.

Throughout these years the principles laid down in the Italian league
of 1455 remained a factor in the maintenance of peace. In an attempt to
build up a system of defence against aggression whether on the part of
an Italian or a foreign Power, the league outlined an elaborate machinery
which never materialised and imposed terms on its members which were
broken almost as soon as they were made. It did not succeed in preventing
war, but it gave expression to the conviction that both common interests,
and those of each state, demanded peace and unity within the borders of
Italy. It remained an ideal to which statesmen appealed, and which the
smaller states hailed as the guarantee of their continued existence. After
the formal renewal of the league for another twenty-five years in 1480, the
preservation of peace depended largely on the close understanding between
Milan, Florence and Naples, and on the untiring efforts of Lorenzo de’
Medici to smooth over occasions for dispute. When the Papacy and Venice
launched an attack on Ferrara, the intervention of the three Powers pre-
served the city for the Este. It was largely owing to Lorenzo de’ Medici
that war between the Papacy and Naples was localised and brought to
a speedy end. His death in April 1492, at a time when relations be-
tween Milan and Naples were deteriorating, and when Charles VIII of
France was succumbing to the lure of Italian adventure, precipitated
the crisis.

25 349 NCMH I

THE RENAISSANCE

When the government of France passed from the capable hands of
Anne of Beaujeu into those of Charles VIII, conflicting counsels were
urged upon the young monarch. Among those who pressed him to enter
Italy as the champion of the Angevin claims to Naples was Antonello di
San Severino, prince of Salerno. A leader of the rebel baronage in the
rising of i486, he had fled from Ferrante’s vengeance to the French court,
where he painted a vivid picture of the sufferings of the Angevin party
in Naples, and the enthusiasm with which its members would rally round
Charles. Although the latter’s title to the throne does not bear examination,
he was, by the will of Rene of Anjou, the recognised representative of
the Angevin cause. Nurtured during his sickly childhood on the romances
of chivalry, Charles saw himself as a conquering hero, who, having won
Naples, would use it as a base for a crusade against the Turks. With a
fine French army waiting to prove itself, he believed that the expedition
would contribute to the glory and unity of the nation. Among Charles’s
counsellors, Guillaume Brigonnet, a finance officer, and Etienne de Vesc,
seneschal of Beaucaire, were eager in their support. On the other hand,
the older men, such as Philippe de Commynes, bred in the tradition of
Louis XI, saw the Italian expedition as a war waged for mere glory which
would not serve French interests. Charles, who, as a Florentine envoy
noted, habitually changed his mind according to the advice of the last
person with him, continued to halt between two opinions. But for the
fresh encouragement which came from Italy, the invasion might never
have taken place.

From the time that Isabella of Aragon married Gian Galeazzo Sforza,
duke of Milan, she made repeated complaints to her father and grandfather
in Naples that she and her husband were in all things subordinate to the
regent, Lodovico, and that she was deprived of her rightful position as
first lady of the court by Lodovico’s wife, Beatrice d’Este. Alfonso of
Calabria caught at an opportunity for asserting himself in Milan, and an
attack from Naples appeared imminent, As Lodovico’s fears increased,
he resolved to use the threat of French invasion as a means of self-protection.
In April 1493, after efforts at reconciliation had failed, he came out
openly as the ally and supporter of France. Relying on past precedents,
he probably thought that the threat would not materialise, and that he
could use it as other Italian Powers had used it, for his own purposes.
It was his misfortune that on this occasion the French came. The Milanese
alliance opened Charles’s passage into Italy, and the scales were now
weighed down on the side of invasion. A further incentive came with
the appearance at the French court of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere.
In the election which followed the death of Innocent VIII, he had been
defeated by Rodrigo Borgia, now Pope Alexander VI. Alive to the em-
barrassment which Charles VIII’s coming must cause to his feared and
hated rival, he urged the invasion with characteristic vehemence. Charles

350

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

hoped to persuade Alexander to invest him with Naples, but there was
always the possibility that, with della Rovere at his side, his crusading
spirit might be directed towards the summons of a general council,
which would depose the pope. Before setting out for Italy, Charles
secured the acquiescence of Ferdinand of Aragon and Maximilian,
king of the Romans, by means of the treaties of Barcelona and Senlis.
The first handed back Roussillon and Cerdagne to Spain, the second
restored Franche-Comte and Artois to Burgundy. Thus the achievements
of Louis XI, which strengthened the frontiers of France at the Pyrenees
and to the east, were thrown away for the shadow of Italian conquests.

As the French invasion of Italy grew imminent, the chief Powers had
to make up their minds on which side to range themselves. Milan’s
choice was already made, but both the Papacy and Florence hesitated as
to the course they should take. Alexander realised that opposition to
France would imperil his position as head of Christendom, but he knew
himself to be incapable of defending his temporal possessions against
Naples. He decided that the nearer danger was the more formidable,
and recognised Alfonso as king on Ferrante’s death, at the same time
admonishing Charles not to disturb the peace of Italy. In Florence,
alliance with France was based on long tradition, and fortified by
commercial ties, but the key-note of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s policy since
1480 had been friendship with Naples and discouragement of French
intervention. The choice between two parts of a policy which could no
longer be united fell to Piero de’ Medici, the stupid boy of the family.
With more courage than wisdom he decided to stand by his Neapolitan
friends. Resolute resistance to France on the part of Venice might have
changed the course of events, but the republic according to her custom
adopted an attitude of strict neutrality. Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna
told the Milanese envoy that his master should consider well this coming
of the French into Italy, saying that in his own opinion Italians should
find some better means of taking vengeance on their enemies than that
of allowing barbarian peoples to come between them. Bologna, lying
astride the Via Emilia, could have been a formidable impediment to the
southward march of the French. Despite his wise words, Giovanni
wavered between fear of offending Milan and hope of obtaining a cardinal’s
hat for his son from the pope, until the course of events had gone beyond
his power to influence them. This absorption in local and personal interests
is typical of the attitude of the smaller Powers. It marks the fundamental
weakness of the Italians which spelt victory for the French.

Alfonso of Aragon had inherited from his father a sound plan of defence,
and adequate forces to put it into operation. The Neapolitan fleet under
the king’s brother Federigo was to blockade Genoa, whilst the bulk of
the army was to take up its position in Romagna, and thus, with the co-
operation of Piero de’ Medici in Tuscany, prevent the French from crossing

351 35-3

THE RENAISSANCE

the Apennines. Disaster occurred at every point. Delay in mobilisation
enabled the duke of Orleans to get into Genoa before the arrival of the
Aragonese fleet. When the French fleet appeared before Rapallo, which
had been occupied by a Genoese exile with Aragonese aid, Federigo
withdrew rather than risk contact with it, leaving Rapallo to its fate. In
Florence, Piero de’ Medici’s support of Naples roused antagonism among
all classes, not least among the operatives in the cloth industry, who were
suffering from lack of work, owing to the French embargo on Florentine
goods. When Charles VIII reached Piacenza after his progress through
Milanese territory, he was met by the representatives of the junior
branch of the Medici family, who assured him that Florence was wholly
French in sympathy. On his arrival in Tuscany, Piero de’ Medici went
secretly to the French camp, and threw himself on Charles’s protection.
The fortresses of Sarzana, Pietrasanta, Leghorn and Pisa were handed
over to the French and the way to Florence lay open. This marked the
end of Piero’s supremacy. A week after he had fled from the city as an
exile Charles VIII entered (17 November 1494), to be received with every
sign of honour, as the man foretold by Savonarola’s preaching, sent from
God to regenerate Italy. Before he left Florence, a treaty was signed by
which the city recognised Charles as the protector of her liberties, and
agreed to contribute financially to his Neapolitan enterprise. From
henceforth, Florence was, in all but name, the vassal of France until the
French were driven from Italy in 1512. Meanwhile, Neapolitan forces in
Romagna, under Alfonso’s heir, Ferrantino, withdrew before the French
contingent advancing along the Via Emilia, and the Orsini, in their
strongholds north of Rome, did nothing to impede the invader’s triumphal
course. Charles entered Rome, as he had entered Florence, without
opposition, and left it having received, by treaty with Alexander, the
right of passage through papal territory. Deserted by his allies, Alfonso
resigned the Crown in favour of his popular young son Ferrantino, yet
he too failed to stay the advance of the French, and on 22 February 1495
Charles entered Naples. Shortly afterwards, the two strongholds of
Castel dell’Uovo and Castel Nuovo surrendered. Ferrantino fled to
Ischia, and practically the whole kingdom was in the hands of the French.
Charles had won Naples without fighting a single battle. The superiority
of the French artillery had proved itself in assaults on outlying fortresses,
and the ferocity of the sack which followed their capture had aroused
terror of the consequences of resistance. As the armies of the allies
melted away, the larger cities, seeing no hope of succour, in turn opened
their gates to the enemy.

Various factors account for the loss of Charles’s acquisitions in Italy
almost as rapidly as they had been won. Among them is the behaviour
of the French in Naples. Lands and offices went to Frenchmen, and
their Angevin supporters were offended at faring no better than the

352

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

adherents of Aragon. Supplies were short, the administration was corrupt,
whilst the army of occupation earned an evil name by its brutality, its
licence and its dirt. Insurrections began before Charles left Naples,
and soon Ferrantino and Federigo of Aragon were at their head. They
had slipped across from Sicily which was to form the base for the re-
conquest of the mainland. Ferdinand the Catholic was determined to
prevent the establishment of French rule in Naples. His troops were
mustered in Sicily under Gonzalo de Cordoba to be transported to
Naples, and to re-establish Ferrantino on his throne. His diplomacy
brought together opposing elements in the League of Venice. The league
was concluded on 31 March 1495, the contracting parties being the pope,
the emperor, Spain, Venice and Milan, and their object the mutual defence
of their states against aggression. In form, the league resembled the
various pacts for the maintenance of peace made between the Italian
Powers during the past forty years. It was welcomed as a sign of the
ending of dissensions which had let in the French, but the real significance
of a combination which included Spain and the Empire was that Italy
had lost control over her own destinies.

On 6 July 1495 the forces of the league led by Francesco Gonzaga
made contact with the French in the Taro valley as Charles was on his
homeward journey. The battle of Fornovo was claimed by both sides as
a victory, but the far heavier losses suffered by the Italians, and the fact
that Charles got away safely into Lombardy, prove that the advantage
lay with the French. Yet the Italians fought vigorously and Gonzaga’s
encircling movement all but succeeded. Lack of discipline and failure
of the various elements in the allied army to co-operate, together with the
unrivalled efficiency of the French gendarmerie, decided the day. ‘Our
chief satisfaction ’, wrote the Milanese envoy in Bologna/ is that the French
have found in Italy forces that can face them, and have learned that Italian
arms are no less sharp than theirs. ’ l This, and the capture of the entire
French baggage train encouraged Gonzaga to order from Mantegna the
Madonna della Vittoria, in commemoration of his exploits on the Taro.
The inclusion of Milan in the League of Venice gave Louis of Orleans the
opportunity to assert his claim to the duchy, as the grandson of Valentina
Visconti. From his grandmother’s dowry town of Asti, where he had
remained since Charles first came to Italy, he occupied Novara, and was
closely besieged by the forces of the league. Charles, however, had no
desire to further his cause, and was as anxious to get home as Lodovico
Sforza was to see the last of him. To the indignation of those in both
camps who desired to go on fighting, they came to terms in the Peace of
Vercelli (10 October 1495) by which Novara was restored to Milan, and

1 ‘Quello che piu piace alia brigata 6 che Franzesi hanno pur trovato in Italia chi li ha
facto volto et facto provare che le arme Italiane non sono mancho pungente che le loro.’
Letter of July 1495, Milan, Archivio di Stato: Potenze Estere, 187.

353

THE RENAISSANCE

Lodovico promised his support to Charles in the event of a new French
expedition. Meanwhile the French viceroy, Montpensier, carried on a
losing struggle in Naples. By the spring of 1496 Ferrantino was in full
possession of his capital. Montpensier and many of his troops succumbed
to the epidemic called by the French le mal de Naples. The chief preoccu-
pation of the few that were left was how to get home. Charles VIII con-
tinued to make plans for a fresh expedition until his death on 7 April 1498
ended his dreams of conquest.

In no Italian state had the coming of the French more momentous
consequences than in Florence. Without it, Girolamo Savonarola might
have been known only as a great preacher, an exponent of the Christian
faith, and a denouncer of vice. His political importance, as the champion
of the French alliance and the new Florentine constitution, began with
the advent of Charles VIII, and the fall of Piero de’ Medici. In the days
of crisis men of all classes hailed him as the herald of a new era of freedom,
peace and prosperity, and owing to his influence the revolution was
effected without bloodshed. The Grand Council, on the Venetian model,
which with its 3000 members gave effective rights of citizenship to a greater
number of Florentines, came into being largely through his advocacy.
It won the approval of the publicists, and was at first generally popular.
Pisa had revolted from Florence when the French took possession
of the fortress, and in friendship with France lay the best hope of its
recovery. Disillusionment soon followed. The Pisan war constituted a
heavy drain on Florentine resources, and the situation worsened when the
French commander, sympathising with the Pisans, handed over the
fortress to them. When Florence refused to enter the League of Venice,
pressure was put upon her by sending help to Pisa, whilst the pope
forbade Savonarola to preach, and finally excommunicated him. Faction,
the curse of Florence, deprived the Grand Council of its competence.
Savonarola’s insistence that his political programme represented the will
of God, which it was sin to disobey, together with the extravagances of
his followers, roused opposition in many quarters, intensifying the enmity
between citizens which he had sought to heal. News of the death of
Charles VIII, deferring hope of assistance from France, came at a time
of reaction against religious revivalism and of acute financial crisis. So,
in return for leave to levy tithes on the clergy, Florence handed over
Savonarola to the papal commissioners and to his death (23 May 1498). His
fall was marked by no change of policy. The republican constitution and
the French alliance remained in being, and the war against Pisa continued
until the city fell to Florence in 1509. During the last Republic (1527-30)
the spirit of the friar lived again. Religious fervour combined with
patriotic ardour to inspire the Florentines in their final struggle for liberty.

With the departure of the French, Lodovico Sforza appeared to have
got all he wanted at comparatively little cost. Gian Galeazzo died in

354

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

October 1494. Whether his death was due to his uncle’s poison or to the
effects of his own excesses on a weak constitution, remains an open
question, although the latter alternative is more probable. Thereupon
Lodovico was proclaimed duke by an assembly of leading citizens, and
in the following year imperial ambassadors solemnly invested him with
the duchy. He was the first Sforza to obtain imperial investiture, Maxi-
milian’s habitual need of money making him ready to sell the privilege
which Frederick III had steadfastly refused. Having made his peace with
Charles VIII, and with nothing to fear from Naples, Lodovico was free
to spend time and money as his personal interests dictated. At the court
of Milan, every aspect of Renaissance life found expression. It numbered
among its members painters, architects, sculptors, musicians, scholars,
and soldiers. All were experts in their own sphere, and added distinction
to it by their work. All played their part in the masques, tournaments and
banquets which marked great occasions, as also in the simpler pleasures
which enlivened the leisure hours of the court. Discussions on topics of
literary and artistic interest, improvisations in song accompanied on the
lyre, games and practical joking offered a rich variety of entertainment.
Immersed in this gay and highly civilised life, Lodovico neglected his
army and his fortresses, and paid no heed to warnings of danger to come.
Despite his genuine interest in schemes for the well-being of his subjects,
heavy taxation and arbitrary rule caused a rising tide of discontent within
the duchy, and his policy during the French invasion had left him without
a friend in Italy. When, with the accession of Louis of Orleans to the throne
of France, the blow fell, Lodovico found himself without means to resist it.

Louis XII’s obsession with the idea of Italian conquest is curiously
inconsistent with the keen appreciation of the needs of France and the
French people discernible in his home policy. A man of simple tastes,
domestic, peace-loving, economical, he was nevertheless tenacious of
his rights. Convinced of the justice of his claim to Milan, he regarded his
failure to conquer it during Charles VIII’s expedition as a disgrace
to be wiped out. His plans for a descent on Italy were warmly sup-
ported by his chief adviser, Georges d’Amboise, archbishop of Rouen,
whose ambitions soared not only to a cardinalate but to the Papacy, and
immediately after the king’s accession preparations were put in hand.
The reaction of the Italian Powers to the prospect of a second French
invasion shows how demoralising were the effects of Charles VIII’s
expedition. Before 1494 they were confident that the French would not
come; after Charles’s withdrawal they flattered themselves that the
French would not stay; the chief thought in their minds was how Louis’s
intervention could best be used to their individual advantage. Alexander VI
at once entered into negotiations with the new king, whom he saw as a
valuable ally in his projects for the extension of the temporal power of
the Papacy, and the advancement of his family. His son Cesare Borgia

355

THE RENAISSANCE

was now bent on exchanging an ecclesiastical for a secular career. He was
on the look-out for a wife and a principality, and Louis agreed to supply
both in return for the facilitation of his divorce from Jeanne de France
and his union with the widowed queen, Anne of Brittany. In 1498 Cesare,
with a retinue of outstanding magnificence, left Italy on a French vessel,
no longer cardinal of Valencia but duke of Valentinois, taking with him
to France the dispensation for Louis’s second marriage and a cardinal’s
hat for d’Amboise. His proposed bride was Carlotta, daughter of King
Federigo of Naples, who had been brought up at the French court, but
Federigo, to his honour and also to his undoing, supported his daughter
in her persistent refusal to marry the ex-cardinal. Instead, Cesare
married Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the king of Navarre, and returned to
Italy with Louis’s invading army. From Milan he set out with the prestige
of the French name, a contingent of French cavalry and some Swiss
infantry, on his first campaign of conquest in Romagna. Florence
welcomed Louis’s coming, which put an end to her isolation in Italy and
gave new hope of recovering Pisa, but it was only after protracted
negotiation that an alliance was signed between France and Venice.
Hatred of Lodovico Sforza, who had made peace behind her back at
Vercelli, and Louis’s promise that in the event of victory her western
frontier should be extended to include Cremona and the Ghiaradadda, at
length turned Venice from her traditional policy of neutrality to active
support of the invaders. No one but Federigo of Naples, whose throne
Louis claimed, and some rulers in the Romagna who feared Cesare Borgia,
ranged themselves on the side of Milan.

In the face of the formidable array of forces piling up against him,
Lodovico Sforza appeared at his worst. Beatrice d’Este was no longer at
his side to resolve his doubts and hesitations by her quick brain and
common sense; he seemed incapable of decision and all his preparations
were begun too late. His chief hope lay in his friendship with the Emperor,
but Maximilian’s capacity to help was as usual unequal to his desire.
The repudiation by the Swiss of the alliance made by certain cantons with
Milan, and the conclusion of a ten years’ treaty with Louis, permitting him
to recruit infantry within Swiss territory, were prompted by Maximilian’s
quarrel with the Confederation in which Lodovico became involved.
At home, Lodovico reaped the fruit of his mistakes. The sound financial
system which he had inherited was thrown into disorder by his lavish
spending. Owing to the favouritism which he showed to Galeazzo San
Severino, a brilliant tournament winner and an incompetent general,
two experienced commanders were alienated. Gian Giacomo Trivulzio
was a member of the Guelf nobility whom Lodovico should have been
careful to placate. When he found himself supplanted in the army by
San Severino he espoused the cause of the Duchess Isabella, and went off
to Naples to lay her grievances before her father. Here he entered French

356

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

service and now returned to Milan at the head of Louis’s invading army.
The count of Caiazzo, who had led the Milanese contingent at Fornovo,
also took offence at his younger brother being preferred to himself and
deserted to the French at the first opportunity. San Severino failed to
hold Alessandria, which was the bulwark of the Milanese defence; as one
city after another yielded to the French, resistance became hopeless, and
in September 1499 Lodovico withdrew to the Tirol, where he and his
two little sons were hospitably received by Maximilian. His hope of a
speedy return lay in the Castello of Milan which he left, fortified and
provisioned to hold out for a year, in the charge of a castellan in whom
he placed implicit confidence. The betrayal of the Castello to the French
by this ‘new Judas’ twelve days after the duke’s departure came as a
crowning misfortune.

Nevertheless, Lodovico’s prospects were not unfavourable. The Swiss
cantons, dissatisfied with their treatment by the French, agreed to supply
him with 10,000 men, with whom he was able to set out for Milan, in the
following spring. Here, the dictatorship of Trivulzio, the leader of one
faction of the nobility, was bitterly opposed by his rivals. Taxation was
heavier than it had been before, the cession of Cremona to Venice aroused
general indignation, and there was a revival of devotion to the ruling
family in which Lodovico’s unpopularity was forgotten. On the news of
his approach, the Milanese rose and seized the city gates. With every
child who could speak shouting Moro 1 in the streets, Trivulzio abandoned
the city, and Lodovico entered amid frantic rejoicing. From this moment
his cause declined. The French clung tenaciously to the Castello and to
other strong places in the duchy. Whilst their army was reinforced,
Lodovico’s resources diminished. On 8 April 1500 a fiasco, unworthy to
be called a battle, at Novara sealed the fate of the house of Sforza. The
Swiss laid down their arms, refusing to fight against their fellow country-
men, and Lodovico was captured by the French when attempting to
escape. His remaining years were spent as a prisoner in France, ‘confining
within narrow walls him whose aspirations and ambitions all Italy had
been hardly wide enough to contain’. 2

Having won Milan, Louis XII aimed next at Naples. He would have
been wise to accept Federigo’s offer to hold his kingdom as a fief of
France, but he preferred the hazardous course laid down in the Treaty
of Granada (November 1500) by which he and Ferdinand of Spain agreed
to conquer and partition the dominion which each coveted. The un-
fortunate Federigo was kept in ignorance of the bargain until the invasion
had begun, and, believing that Gonzalo had come to his aid, he prepared

1 Lodovico was known popularly as II Moro. He adopted both the mulberry and the
Moor’s head as his devices.

! ‘Rinchiudendosi in una angusta carcere i pensieri e l’ambizione di colui, che prima
appena capivano i termini di tutta Italia.’ Guicciardini, Storia d’ltalia, bk. iv.

357

THE RENAISSANCE

to give battle to the French. When he found that Ferdinand was against
him, he knew that his cause was lost, and after the capture and sack of
Capua by the French he submitted unconditionally to Louis, choosing
to trust an open enemy rather than the kinsman who had betrayed him.
He was treated generously, being sent to France, and given the duchy of
Anjou in compensation for his lost kingdom. Louis was now possessed
of the northern half of Naples, including the capital, whilst Ferdinand
held Apulia and Calabria. The latter was abler and more unscrupulous
than his partner and had greater advantages, both military and political.
Very soon disputes between the allies led to war, and war ended in the
ejection of the French from their portion of the kingdom. Trouble arose
over certain districts which had not been mentioned in the partition treaty,
especially over Capitanata, lying between French Abruzzi and Spanish
Apulia, to which each side laid claim. Its importance lay in its fertility,
and in the profits derived from the tolls levied on the cattle going to
and fro between their summer and winter pastures. The French took up
arms to enforce their claim and at first had some success. Gonzalo
retired to Barletta where he remained besieged throughout the winter of
1502-3, maintained by supplies brought by sea from Spain and Sicily. In
the spring reinforcements poured in, and he was able to take the field;
here his victory at Cerignola opened his road to the capital. The French
retired to Gaeta until they were strong enough to make a southward drive
on Naples, but they were delayed by various causes, and it was mid-winter
when the two armies faced each other on either side of the Garigliano.
Gonzalo contrived to get across the river secretly by means of a bridge
of boats, and took the French by surprise. After a fierce battle they
retreated in disorder to Gaeta, and on 1 January 1504 this, their last
stronghold in Neapolitan territory, yielded to the Spaniards. The whole
kingdom was now reunited under the Crown of Aragon. In Italy Aragonese
rule in Naples was no innovation. The French kings were foreign invaders,
but the Aragonese were accepted sovereigns who had adapted themselves
to Italian ways. Thus the transference of the throne from the illegitimate
to the legitimate line aroused little apprehension. Inhabitants of the
kingdom had yet to learn the difference between the easy-going Catalans
and Valencians, who had surrounded the first Aragonese king of Naples,
and the Castilian officials who came to extend to their new acquisition
the centralising policy of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain. Few native
rulers grasped that a Mediterranean Power, long established in Sicily and
Sardinia, had a vital interest in controlling Italy and effective means of
so doing, or that the roots previously struck by the Aragonese on the
mainland rendered them more formidable enemies of Italian independence
than the French could ever be.

Among Louis XII’s allies, none gained more from his coming than the
Papacy which, during his reign in Milan, succeeded in bringing practically

358

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

all the states of the Church under its direct rule. The first stage in the process
was the work of Cesare Borgia. In three breathless campaigns he made
himself master of Romagna, driving the native lords from their cities, and
establishing order and unity in the province. He organised an army
owing allegiance to himself alone, set up a central court of justice, and
did his best to secure that all classes subject to him benefited by his rule.
Finding his plans for extending his power in Tuscany thwarted by
Louis XII’s alliance with Florence, he was contemplating deserting France
for Spain, when his career was cut short by the death of Alexander VI
(August 1503). His outstanding characteristics were utter ruthlessness,
personal magnetism and a certain flair for good government. These led
Machiavelli to see in him a potential saviour of Italy, but the man who
by his treachery, cruelty, and self-seeking earned the detestation of his
neighbours was ill-fitted for such a role. 1

Cesare Borgia’s achievements ended the day of small states in Romagna.
Few cities, after his fall, showed any inclination to receive back their
ruling families, and Giuliano della Rovere who, after the brief pontificate
of Pius III succeeded to the Papacy as Julius II, reaped the fruits of his
work. Julius was a man of vast ambitions and boundless energy. His
aims were first to recover all the territories of the Church, and then to
place himself at the head of an Italian confederation which should drive
out the foreigner. Louis XII reluctantly promised aid for the pope’s
immediate enterprise, and after two years of preparation Julius set out
from Rome on a campaign of conquest, forcing all but the most infirm
of the cardinals to accompany him. On his approach to Perugia, Baglioni,
the local despot, came out to place the city in his hands. There followed
the flight of Giovanni Bentivoglio from Bologna and the triumphal entry
of the papal forces. This great city was a prize which had eluded Cesare
Borgia. Here Julius held his court during the winter of 1506-7, well
satisfied with his achievement. He returned to Rome on the disquieting
news of the rebellion of Genoa against the French and its suppression
by Louis XII in person. Julius was not alone in his alarm at such a demon-
stration of French power. Maximilian complained that Louis coveted the
Empire for himself and the Papacy for Amboise, and announced his
intention to come to Italy to receive the imperial crown and to assert his
suzerain rights over both Genoa and Milan. Ferdinand of Spain came to
meet Louis at Savona, where under cover of a courtesy visit the two
monarchs reached an understanding with regard to their future policy in
Italy. In 1508 Maximilian asked passage for his army through Venetian
territory and, on being refused, came notwithstanding. His forces were
defeated in Friuli and he had to agree to a truce which left the Venetians

1 Pepe, La politico dei Borgia (1946), denies that Cesare’s rule in Romagna was in any
way beneficent, but the evidence of his reforms, and the opinion of contemporaries such as
Guicciardini cannot lightly be disregarded.

359

THE RENAISSANCE

in possession of Fiume, Trieste and other cities, hitherto Habsburg.
Thereupon both Maximilian and Louis decided to end their quarrels in
order to combine against Venice. Margaret of Austria and d’Amboise
were sent to Cambrai as their plenipotentiaries, to draw up terms of peace,
and to make provision for a league which should despoil Venice of all
the territories which she had won at the expense of Italian Powers during
the last hundred years. Maximilian’s share was to extend as far west as
the Mincio, including the important city of Verona. The cities between the
Mincio and the Adda were to be restored to Milan. Naples was to receive
back Brindisi and other Apulian ports occupied by Venice when she
helped to drive Charles VIII from Italy. Mantua and Ferrara, which had
both suffered losses, were included in the League of Cambrai, and promised
that their former possessions should be returned to them.

Julius II’s quarrel with Venice was both ecclesiastical and territorial.
She had taken advantage of Cesare Borgia’s fall to increase the number of
cities which she held in Romagna, and had ignored the pope’s peremptory
demands for their restoration. She had refused to bestow the temporalities
of bishoprics upon papal nominees who were not Venetian subjects.
There is a story of a war of words between the Venetian ambassador and
Julius II, in which the latter declared ‘ I shall not rest until I have made you,
as you were, humble fishermen’, to which the ambassador replied ‘Holy
Father, if you are not careful, we could far more easily make you a little
clerk’. 1 Julius’s first intention was merely to use the threat of the League
of Cambrai to induce Venice to submit to his demands, and he only joined
the allies on the eve of the outbreak of hostilities. On io May 1509
Louis XII crossed the Adda in force and a few days later at Agnadello,
in the territory ceded by France to Venice ten years before, the one
important battle of the war took place. Owing to lack of co-operation
between the two chief commanders, a part only of the Venetian army
faced the concentrated power of the French. The infantry, in particular,
fought with great gallantry, but the odds against the Venetians were
overwhelming and they suffered a major defeat, which was followed by
the loss of their entire dominion. One after the other the cities hastened
to make terms with their new masters, and there were those in the
Venetian Senate who advocated the final abandonment of their mainland
territories and a return to the sea. Venice, however, had two great
advantages ; one was the jealousy and suspicion rife among her enemies,
the other the recognition by the subject cities of the benefits enjoyed under
her rule. Typical of the turning of the tide is the part played by the
Vicentine noble Luigi da Porto whose war memoirs in the form of letters
give an illuminating picture of the times. He and his family welcomed

1 Da Porto, Lettere Storiche (ed. Bressan, 1857), p. 30. ‘Io non mi rimarrd che non vi
abbia fatti umili e tutti pescatori, sicome foste.’ ‘Vieppiu agevolmente vi faremo noi.
Padre Santo, un piccol chierico, se non sarete prudente.’

360

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

Maximilian on his occupation of Vicenza, saying that their object was to
be on the winning side, but when the opportunity came they helped to
restore their city to Venice; Luigi then fought under Venetian banners
until disabled by a wound. In 1510 Julius II changed sides. When he had
ousted the Venetians from their cities in Romagna he had only to win
Ferrara in order to have the papal states under his control. The dukes of
Ferrara relied upon France to maintain their independence, and Julius’s
attack on Ferrara became an episode in his war with the French. The
events of the next two years include a treaty imposed by the pope on
Venice, which she refused to consider as binding, an unsuccessful campaign
against Ferrara, and the temporary restoration of the Bentivoglio to
Bologna by French arms. Whilst a schismatic council, summoned to Pisa
under French auspices and later transferred to Milan, carried the struggle
into the ecclesiastical field, Julius laboured until he had brought all the
enemies of France together in the Holy League. Ferdinand of Aragon,
having recovered his Apulian ports from Venice without fighting for them,
readily joined the league and sent the viceroy of Naples to besiege Bologna.
Gaston de Foix came from Milan to its defence. He had succeeded in
raising the siege when news that Brescia, through the action of some
leading citizens, was again in Venetian hands called him back to Lombardy.
Brescia was re-conquered and mercilessly sacked by the French. Gaston
then returned to face the army of the league at Ravenna. The battle of
Ravenna (11 April 1512) proved a desperate struggle between two evenly
matched forces in which the losses on both sides were exceedingly heavy.
At one point the Spanish and papal troops all but got the upper hand,
but the French cavalry, effectively supported by Ferrarese guns, finally
won the day. Gaston de Foix, a young man of outstanding military
genius, was among the killed and the loss of their leader turned the joy
of the victors into sorrow. The French were in no condition to face the new
crisis which came upon them in the following month with the descent of
the Swiss upon the Milanese.

The part played by the Swiss in the Italian wars was the outcome of
their economic ties with the duchy of Milan and also of their national
industry as mercenaries. If easy access to Milan was important to the
trade of the urban cantons, to the forest cantons it was vital, as the
duchy was their main source of corn and wine. When the king of France,
the chief employer of Swiss infantry, became duke of Milan, the Con-
federation hoped to profit both as traders and fighters. In fact, the
relations between Louis XII and the Swiss were marked by one quarrel
after another. Ill-feeling was aroused by disputes over trade, over the
occupation of Bellinzona by men of the forest cantons, and over the
payment of Swiss infantry and their unauthorised employment against
Genoa. As a result of the tension the Franco-Swiss alliance was not
renewed in 1509. Under the leadership of Matthias Schinner, cardinal

361

THE RENAISSANCE

bishop of Sion, the Swiss prepared to act as an independent Power in
Italy. This warrior-patriot was a man after Julius II’s own heart, and
through their combined efforts the Swiss, as members of the Holy League,
became the chief instrument in the expulsion of the French. With
Maximilian’s permission, Schinner’s forces entered Italy by the Brenner
Pass bringing with them Lodovico Sforza’s elder son, Massimiliano.
The French were taken by surprise and withdrew without a contest.
With the army went the council, which had been deliberating over the
election of an anti-pope, and now passed into oblivion at Lyons. In 1513
the French attempted to fight their way back, only to be routed by the
Swiss at Novara. Massimiliano was recognised as duke by the Holy
League, and the Swiss remained in control of the duchy. In France, the
failure to hold Milan aroused little regret ; it was viewed rather as a relief
from an unprofitable burden. Machiavelli ascribes Louis’ undoing to
the mistakes which he made in Italy, but a greater mistake than any of
these was his decision to go there at all.

The expulsion of the French, which set a Sforza upon the throne in
Milan, also brought the Medici back to Florence. The republic had
gained little from its alliance with Louis XII. French military aid in the
Pisan war was not worth the large sums which were paid for it, and was
offset by the help which the enemies of France gave to the Pisans. When
in 1509 Pisa was at last obliged to yield, Florentine arms alone were
responsible for the victory, all other forces being engaged in the war
between the League of Cambrai and Venice. The election of Piero Soderini
as Gonfaloniere di Giustizia for life gave the republic a permanent head,
but it did not heal party strife or rescue Florentine finances from the
chaos into which they had fallen. Soderini’s refusal to join the Holy
League exposed Florence to the attacks of Julius II, and caused discontent
within the city which played into the hands of the Medici party. The end
came in August 1512, when Spanish forces assaulted Prato, the Florentine
militia engaged in its defence ran away, and Prato was taken and sacked.
A few days later, Soderini was deposed and the Medici were invited to
return. The leading members of the family at the time were the two
younger sons of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and his grandson and namesake,
Lorenzo, the son of Piero. In 1 5 1 3 Cardinal Giovanni, already the moving
spirit among them, became Pope Leo X. The Medici, as virtual rulers of
Florence, succeeded to the dominating position in Tuscany which Cesare
Borgia was trying to acquire at the time of his fall ; thus a great block of
territory stretching from sea to sea across central Italy was under the
control of a single family. If any one of their number possessed Cesare’s
gifts, he had a unique opportunity to unite Italy under his leadership and
drive out the foreigner. Such were the circumstances which inspired
Machiavelli to write II Principe and to dedicate it first to Giuliano and

362

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

later to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici. Yet both lacked the ability and the
motive for such a task. The amiable and popular Giuliano would have
been content to live in Florence as a private citizen, and at the instance
of Leo X he soon yielded his place as head of the State to his nephew.
Lorenzo had energy and ambition, but he was a poor soldier, and his
craving for the outward signs of lordship made him ill-fitted for the govern-
ment of a republic. Leo X’s chief concern was the advancement of his
family and, second to this, the increase of papal power. In pursuit of those
aims he was as ready to make terms with foreign rulers as to expel them.
He drove Francesco della Rovere from Urbino and made Lorenzo de’
Medici duke in his place. He even talked of placing Giuliano on the
throne of Naples, yet he was by nature a dilettante and his energies were
dissipated by the delights of life in Rome, where under his patronage the
Renaissance reached its zenith. Throughout Italy the departure of the
French was the signal for a return to the old ways, and amid the gay and
cultivated life of the courts the brief respite from foreign invasion was
allowed to pass without heed for the future. The third French expedition
entered an Italy unprepared and divided.

In August 1515 Francis I crossed the Alps at the head of an army which
comprised the flower of the French nation. Great nobles such as Bourbon
and Alengon were in the front line, the incomparable cavalry were 3000
strong, and although the bulk of the infantry were German mercenaries
they were supported by Gascons. Like Charles VIII, Francis made
Constantinople his ultimate aim, yet his motive was neither the chivalrous
romanticism which had inspired Charles, nor Louis XII’s determination
to secure his legal rights, but glory for himself and France. He was a
typical Renaissance monarch, who demanded a wide field on which to
deploy his varied gifts of mind and body. The Venetians were once more
allies of France, and their forces under Bartolomeo d’Alviano, who had
been taken prisoner at Agnadello, played a crucial part in the campaign.
Another former enemy in French service was the famous engineer and
mine-layer Pedro Navarra, who had helped to take many castles for the
Aragonese in the Neapolitan wars, and was now in charge of the French
artillery. Against the French were ranged the combined forces of the
Holy League. Leo X negotiated with both sides but decided in the end
to support his allies ; he sent a force under Lorenzo de’ Medici to Piacenza,
and lent troops to the Milanese. A contingent from Naples was hurried
north and took up its stand at Verona, which was still held by Maximilian.
The brunt of the defence of Milan lay with the Swiss, whose hold upon the
duchy was by no means secure. The treaty signed between Massimiliano
and the Confederation offered a unique opportunity for the economic and
political development of the Swiss, if they had been far-sighted enough
to allow time for the duchy to recover its prosperity before pressing their
financial claims to the full. The first consideration of a nation of mercenaries

363

THE RENAISSANCE

was, however, prompt payment for their services, and Schinner’s efforts
to restrain their rapacity met with little success. Massimiliano’s ex-
travagance further increased the financial burden imposed on an exhausted
people, until it was said openly that French rule was preferable to the
present regime. Among the cantons, also, a French party appeared,
which preferred the old system of bribes and pensions from France to
independent action on the part of the Confederation. Thus discontent in
Milan and dissension among the Swiss paved the way for defeat in the
field. •

Francis I was expected to enter Italy either by the Mont Cenis Pass or
by that of Mont Genevre, and the Swiss were stationed at Susa to
intercept him as he descended into the plain. His appearance by the
unfrequented passage of the Col d’Argentiere turned the Swiss posi-
tion and forced them to fall back on the capital. The French, having
routed the Milanese troops at Villafranca, encamped at Marignano, a
few miles south-east of Milan, and here on 14-15 September a two-day
battle was fought. Again and again the weight of the Swiss infantry was
hurled against the French and was repelled at heavy cost. To Gian
Giacomo Trivulzio, fighting the last of his eighteen battles, it seemed no
mere human contest but a struggle between giants. The French were
beginning to yield when Trivulzio caused confusion in the Swiss ranks
by flooding the meadows where they fought, and the arrival of d’Alviano
and his Venetians decided the day. Venetian forces further contributed to
the French victory by tying down the Spaniards to Verona. The papal
contingent remained throughout motionless at Piacenza.

The battle of Marignano marked the end of an epoch. Its immediate
effect was the elimination of the Swiss as an independent factor in Italian
politics. The task of holding the duchy of Milan had shown itself to be
too great for the loosely constructed Confederation, even before the
legend of Swiss invincibility was shattered. Marignano proved the false-
hood of Machiavelli’s dictum that the French were no match for the
Swiss. After an abortive attack on Milan in the spring of 1516, Schinner
came to terms with France in the Eternal Peace of Fribourg. The Swiss
had to surrender Domodossola, controlling the Simplon Pass, but they
kept Bellinzona and the Ticino valley, together with the greater part of
Lake Lugano, and the Locarno end of Lake Maggiore. Thus the frontiers
between Switzerland and the Milanese were fixed substantially as they
remain today. The treaty revived the system of pensions which bound the
Swiss to the service of France. Henceforth their role in European
conflicts was simply that of mercenaries ; their policy as a nation was, as
it still is, one of strict neutrality. The effects of the battle were also decisive
for the Italian States. Francis I became duke of Milan, and Massimiliano
retired on a pension to a life of ease in France. There was no further
hope that Milan could retain its independence. Although there was to be

364

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

one more Sforza duke, he owed his position to the Emperor Charles V,
and his reign was the prelude to direct Spanish rule. Leo X made his
peace with Francis I, yielding to him Parma and Piacenza, cities long in
dispute between Milan and the Papacy, and receiving in return Francis’s
guarantee that the Medici should remain in Florence. After the death of
both Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florentine affairs were directed
mainly from Rome, thus weakening still further the illusion that Florence
was a free republic. In December 1515 Leo X and Francis I met at
Bologna. The outcome of their conversations was the settlement of the
relations between the French Church and the Papacy after nearly eighty
years of discord. Although the pope gained by the abolition of the
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), he conceded to the Crown the
right of nomination to French bishoprics and abbeys, and submitted to
a limitation of his powers of provision. The Concordat of Bologna bore
the marks of an agreement between victor and vanquished ; in it Gallican
liberties and papal prerogatives were alike sacrificed to the royal supremacy.
For Venice, Marignano paved the way for the final settlement of the
issues raised by the League of Cambrai. In 1509 Maximilian had offended
the citizens of Verona by his dilatoriness in taking possession of the city,
but once occupied he could not be persuaded to relinquish it. He was
now faced with the necessity of coming to terms with Francis I, and agreed
to hand it over to him, on the understanding that it should be returned to
Venice. With the recovery of Verona, Venice was once more in possession of
the bulk of her mainland territory. Recent acquisitions, such as Cremona
and the towns taken from Maximilian beyond the Isonzo, were lost, as were
the cities which she had held in Romagna and Apulia, but the greater part
of the Lombard plain was in her hands . It remained V enetian until the coming
of Napoleon, and as long as the Republic of St Mark lasted was the freest and
most prosperous part of Italy. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Power that
gained most from the French victory was Spain. So long as the Swiss
remained in Milan they reaped the advantage of any counter-moves against
the French. Now Spain stood out as the sole effective rival to France in
Italy. In the course of three successive invasions Italian independence had
been destroyed. The next phase was to be a struggle between two major
European Powers for predominance, in which the Italian States strove to
preserve some measure of freedom by playing off one against the other.

The failure of Italy to stand up to invasion should not be attributed
primarily to military incapacity. Far more serious than any weakness in
her armed forces was the fervid local patriotism which divided state from
state. The evils of separatism were further intensified by the internal
divisions which undermined the stability of every government and in-
creased the fears and suspicions with which each state regarded its
neighbours. The first shock of Charles VIII’s invasion fell on armies less
well-equipped than the French, especially in the matter of artillery, and

36 365 NCMH I

THE RENAISSANCE

unaccustomed to the rapidity and ruthlessness with which the seasoned
forces of the enemy swept obstacles from their path. In the course of the
war the Italians showed remarkable initiative in adapting themselves to
new methods. Cesare Borgia, with the help of Leonardo da Vinci,
provided himself with an efficient artillery, and before the end of the period
Alfonso d’Este had made the Ferrarese guns superior to all others.
Recruiting of infantry had increased considerably before the invasions,
and its development was pressed on. At Citta di Castello, the Vitelli
brothers, all of them notable condottieri, trained their infantry on the
Swiss model. The wars show many instances of skill and bravery on the
part of individual Italians. Among them is the famous combat between
thirteen Italians and thirteen Frenchmen at Barletta in 1503, when the
French, who had boasted of their superiority, were completely defeated.
The memory of this feat of valour lived on, and became the theme of a
novel written by an Italian patriot in the early days of the Risorgimento.
Although the Italians produced no military genius equal to Gonzalo de
Cordoba or Gaston de Foix, they had among them distinguished generals.
The great Roman families of Orsini and Colonna were trained from
boyhood in the profession of arms, and fought all over Italy. Prospero
Colonna contributed to the defeat of the French on the Garigliano, and
later, in the service of Charles V, showed himself a worthy disciple of
Gonzalo. Bartolomeo d’Alviano was an Orsini by adoption, who
practised the French method of swift attack. His defeat at Agnadello was
due to the failure of his colleague to support him, and of the Venetians
to ensure unity of command. During his captivity in France he acted as
a loyal servant of Venice, helping to renew her alliance with the French
and returning to win glory at Marignano. Pedro Navarra, although an
alien by birth, spent his active life in Italy and first won fame as a mine-
layer in the service of the Florentines at the siege of Sarzana in 1488.
If the legend of the condottieri as incompetent, treacherous, greedy, and
intent on avoiding battle still persists, its falsehood is apparent. War, like
much else in Renaissance Italy, was practised as a fine art by men who
studied their profession, and were eager to distinguish themselves in it.
There were traitors among them, but there were those who were faithful to
their employers against their own interest. The transference of a captain
from one side to another was prompted not for the most part by love of
money but by the desire for a more important field of activity, or readiness
to take offence. Italians fought well and courageously in the principal
battles of the period, but separatist interests prevented them from
fighting as a united army. Relations between Milan and Venice were so
far from friendly at the time of the battle of Fomovo that Caiazzo was
suspected of deliberately holding back the Milanese forces on his employers’
orders. The suspicion was apparently unfounded, but the fact that it was
widely believed at the time could not fail to injure the allied cause. When

366

THE INVASIONS OF ITALY

appeal was made to Florence to join the league for the expulsion of the
French for the sake of the good of Italy, the line taken by the republic
was that its concern was not with the good of Italy but with the recovery
of Pisa. Whilst state was divided against state, the rulers had everywhere
to reckon with enemies within the gate. The instability of Naples, with
a baronage divided into opposing factions, agreeing only in their desire
to weaken the monarchy, is obvious. Elsewhere Italy was a land of
city-states, each conceiving of itself as a Roman republic in miniature,
and claiming sovereignty for its citizens. The title of the despots to rule
was, in the first instance, authority conferred on them by the people,
and although several had supplemented popular election by obtaining
investiture with their city from pope or emperor, their continuance in
office depended upon the goodwill of their subjects. Even in so well-
established a monarchy as Milan, there was a republican party traditionally
opposed to the Sforza dukes, which, when discontented with the govern-
ment, welcomed the coming of the French. Rulers with no legal title,
who were merely leading citizens, were even less secure. There were other
wealthy families in Florence who considered themselves as well-fitted as
the Medici for the first place in the city and awaited an opportunity to
turn against them. During the war against Venice the ties which bound
subject cities to the republic were those of convenience rather than of
loyalty. The patriotism of the citizens was concentrated within their walls,
and the welfare of their own city was their primary consideration. Italians
intent on the hard task of maintaining the independence and integrity of
their states sought aid from the foreigner or opposed him, as their needs
dictated. When Francesco Gonzaga, as a captain of the Church, was
engaged against the French in 1510, his wife Isabella d’Este acted as his
regent in Mantua. She gave instructions to castellans in Mantuan territory
to give passage to French troops coming to the defence of her brother
in Ferrara, and to excuse themselves on the ground that they had yielded
to superior force. In her eyes France was the friend and Julius II the
enemy; she is a typical representative of a nation that was, as yet, incapable
of united political action.

367

36-2

CHAPTER XIII

EASTERN EUROPE

F or the thirty-five years before its transformation under the effects of
the battle of Mohacs, Europe east of the frontiers of the Empire
and north of the lines reached at that date by the Turkish armies fell
into two parts, sharply distinguished politically and even psychologically :
on the one hand, the Russian lands which the grand dukes of Moscow
were welding into a compact, disciplined and self-regarding world on its
own ; on the other, the vast and complex area comprising the kingdoms
of Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and Bohemia — for the connection between
Bohemia and the Empire was during this period purely technical, whereas
it was intimately joined with Hungary and in close relationship with
Poland. These three kingdoms were linked together, albeit loosely and,
as the future was to prove, transiently, by dynastic ties ; the Crowns of
Hungary and Bohemia were united, and that of Poland held by brothers
or uncles of the Hungarian king, all these rulers belonging to the Polish-
Lithuanian house of Jagiello. The principality of Moldavia alternated
between semi-independence and vassalage, now to the Porte, now to
Hungary, now to Poland.

It is permissible to confine our account of the easternmost of these
two divisions to a very few words, for the rise of Moscow and the growth,
round the Muscovite nucleus, of the Russian State, in which the whole
history of this area resides, were processes which had begun long before
1490 and were not completed until long after 1526: the period described
here constitutes only a term in a steady progression. It was, indeed, a
brilliant one. Ivan the Great, grand prince of Moscow from 1462 to 1505,
was among the most conspicuously successful of all his line. He may,
indeed, be regarded as the real founder of the Russian State. His ab-
sorption of Novgorod, with its vast territories, a task accomplished
by gradual stages between 1465 and 1488, not only brought him an
immense access of strength but also settled for all time the question
whether Moscow or Lithuania should be the ultimate heir to Kiev. Perm,
subjected in 1472, was a territorially even larger addition, although
strategically less important. Vyatka, Tver and Ryazan followed in and
around 1485. Meanwhile Ivan had shaken off the last relics of the Tatar
yoke in 1480; thereafter the various Tatar hordes were sometimes his
enemies, but as often, his clients and allies; in any case, no longer his
masters.

What was new in Ivan’s reign was not the increases in territory and
independence which he brought to his throne — here he was only carrying

368

EASTERN EUROPE

on the work of more than one predecessor — but the conscious and
confident claim made by him in justification for his aggression.

As he enlarges his territories and consolidates his position, Ivan begins,
partly under the influence of his wife Zoe (Sophia) Palaeologue, to put
forward larger claims still, to be the heir of Kiev, of Byzantium and even
Rome. He takes the arms of the two-headed eagle and the title of
Samoderzshets (auTOKpcrrcop) and ‘ Sovereign of all Russia He proudly
rejects the Emperor Frederick’s offer to confer on him the title of king:
‘ We have wanted it from no one, and do not want it now. ’ ‘ We, by the
grace of God, are sovereigns in our own land from the beginning, from
our first forefathers, and we hold our appointment from God.’ When
Casimir of Poland complains in 1501 that Ivan is seizing his patrimony,
he answers: ‘What do they call their patrimony? The Russian land is
our patrimony from our ancestors of old.’ In 1503 he again describes as
his ‘patrimony’ ‘the Russian land which is in the hands of Lithuania —
Kiev, Smolensk and the other towns . . . .Our patrimony is not only those
towns and districts which we now hold, but all the Russian land of old,
from our forefathers also.’ And this dynastic claim is linked with and
reinforced by a religious one. Since the fall of Constantinople, Moscow
is the ‘Third Rome’, even the ‘Second Jerusalem’. The metropolitan of
Moscow is not yet patriarch, but there is no question of his deriving his
appointment from Constantinople, or of being anyone but a Russian.
The wars with Lithuania and Poland are waged in part for the recovery
of ‘the patrimony of St Vladimir’ and Alexander of Lithuania’s attempts
to propagate the Union of Florence among his Orthodox subjects suffice
Ivan for a casus belli.

Under these conditions there could be no question of lasting peace
between Moscow and Poland- Lithuania : Ivan himself told his ally, the
khan of the Crimean Tatars, that there could be no peace, ‘ only pauses
to draw breath’. These words accurately define the history of Ivan’s
relations with his western neighbour, the main events of which are given
below, in another connection. Although fortunes fluctuated, the balance
of advantage, in the long run, was with Ivan; and it is worth mentioning
that this was not due only to force of arms. The Russian towns under
Lithuanian sovereignty were not impervious to the Muscovite and Ortho-
dox appeal, and several of them — Peremysl, Serejsk, Kozelsk — changed
their allegiance voluntarily. Novgorod itself, while specifically rejecting
the claim to be a ‘patrimony’, had contained a large party which thought
union with Moscow more natural than the Lithuanian alternative.

Ivan’s death in 1505 naturally slowed down the rate of Muscovite
expansion, and the only important gain in the west made by his son and
successor Basil (1505-33) was that of the fortress of Smolensk; besides
which he rounded off Moscow’s conquests nearer home by incorpora-
ting the rest of Ryazan, and destroying the liberties of Pskov. But the

369

THE RENAISSANCE

objectives of his policy were exactly those of his father, as they were to be
also those of his son, Ivan the Terrible. His internal policy, too, was in
the direct line. Ivan had taken away the Bell of Novgorod, symbol of its
self-government, Basil took away the Bell of Pskov. The process is one
of steady centralisation and subordination to a single will, exercised
through a bureaucracy which is still primitive, but now beginning to take
definite shape.

The fortunes of the countries west of Moscow require, and deserve,
more detailed description, both on account of their greater complexity
and because, unlike those of Muscovy, they form a distinct chapter in
the history of each country. The intimate connection established in 1290
between Poland, Hungary and Bohemia might, indeed, have seemed at
the time only a part of a process of development destined to continue and
eventually to result in the emergence of some sort of real unity in this
area which possessed so many common features and common interests.
History shows it to have been the precursor of an act of violent disinte-
gration which threw Bohemia and part of Hungary into a western system
centring on Vienna, the rest of Hungary into the eastern world dominated
by the Porte, and left Poland as the sole surviving independent represen-
tative of the earlier grouping. And as we shall see, this disintegration was
not altogether a reversal of the provisions made for the future during the
period itself, but, so far as the eastward extension of the Habsburg power is
concerned, the fulfilment of them. Nevertheless, it is still legitimate to spec-
ulate how far the triumph of the centrifugal over the centripetal tendency
represented the inevitable triumph of the stronger natural forces or how far
it was brought about by trivial and personal motives which might as easily
have acted in the opposite direction. It is the possibility which the story
offers for this speculation that lends it its peculiar and painful interest.

It is, however, undeniable that the position which obtained in 1490 —
Jagiellos on all three thrones, Habsburgs as serious claimants to two of
them, temporarily behind in the race but with far the larger reserves of
strength — was largely due to what may legitimately be called chance: the
incidence of birth and death in half-a-dozen families. Up to the opening
of the fourteenth century Poland, Hungary and Bohemia had developed
on lines which were parallel and natural, if anything may be called natural :
under dynasties of native stock, whose members followed policies which
were always based on their nations and usually consonant with the
national interests and wishes. Then, while the Polish Piasts survived (and
if their rate of reproduction, too, fell below replacement level, this was
all to Poland’s advantage, for since Boleslav Ill’s seventeen children there
had been far too many Piasts), the Arpads and the Przemyslides died out
almost simultaneously, leaving Hungary and Bohemia to be scrambled
for by competing European dynasties. The male lines of both families
to which the prizes fell died out in their turn, that of the Hungarian

370

EASTERN EUROPE

Angevins after two generations, and that of the Luxemburgers in Bohemia
after three, and it was purely the thought taken by royal fathers for their
daughters, as expressed in the series of compacts concluded by the two
families with one another and with their Habsburg neighbours, that brought
the Habsburg, Albert III, on to both thrones in 1437.

Now the luck which had been so benignant to the Habsburgs turned
against them, for Albert died in 1439, after a reign of less than three
years, and left no son, although his wife was pregnant. Meanwhile the
Poles had saved themselves in curious fashion: the rule of the foreign
king, Louis of Hungary, who was brought to Poland when the direct
male line of the senior branch of the Piasts closed with Casimir the Great
(distant cousins survived, but could not win support for their claims), was
so unpopular (and memories as disagreeable survived of the Czech king
Wenzel II), that when he died leaving only daughters, of whom the one
destined for Poland was betrothed to another Habsburg, the nation
revolted, broke the engagement and married the little princess to the
stem Lithuanian, Jagiello: a foreigner too, but lacking the far-flung
international engagements of the more fashionable dynasties. Jagiello
proved successful as Jadwiga’s consort. He had, however, no issue by
her, a daughter who died early by his second wife, and again no children
by his third. By the wife of his old age (a Lithuanian lady unrelated to any
European dynasty), he became father of three sons of whom two survived
him, thus re-establishing a national dynasty which could not only exclude
any other claim to the Polish Crown but itself export kings to other
countries in need thereof.

The first such invitation to be received by any Jagiello prince — that
addressed to Jagiello’s younger son, Prince Casimir, in 1437 by a party
among the Czech nobles — did owe something to questions of suitability,
for Casimir’s sponsors were those Czechs who objected to Albert for
his German birth and his Catholic connections. But even so, what
commended Casimir to his partisans was the absence of these defects in
him, not any positive qualities; none of them thought of creating a
Polish-Czech union. And when, in 1439, the Hungarians elected Jagiello’s
elder son Wladislaw ( Vlaszlo ) as soon as Albert died, this was simply
and solely because he was at hand, and more or less adult by the standards
of the time (he was sixteen years of age), and with the Turkish danger
pressing as it was they simply dared not wait for the birth of Albert’s
child, who might not even be a boy. It is true that among the promises
which Wladislaw made to his electors was the defence of Hungary with
both the Hungarian and Polish armies ; but the Habsburgs could probably
have raised an equally effective force. Then Wladislaw was killed at
Varna in 1444 leading an army in which, in fact, hardly any Poles were
present, and Albert’s son Ladislas Postumus got the two thrones after
all; but when he died unmarried in 1457, the establishment in both

37 1

THE RENAISSANCE

countries of national kingdoms under Matthias Corvinus and George
Podiebrad respectively was assuredly, to both, the most popular of all
possible solutions.

And for a time it seemed likely to prove permanent. Both Habshurgs
and Jagiellos (not to mention other, less important, dynasties) maintained
their claims to the two thrones, under titles complicated by the fact
that Casimir Jagiello, who succeeded his brother, married Elizabeth of
Habsburg, Albert’s daughter and sister of Ladislas Postumus, and claimed
the crowns for her Jagiello children as heirs to her Habsburg brother;
while the Emperor Frederick claimed them in virtue of the old compacts
concluded in 1362-4 between his family and Charles IV of Bohemia.
But Frederick was notoriously inactive, and the Bohemian Crown made
no special appeal to him: in the end he himself, as emperor, invested
George with the insignia of royalty. If he pressed his claim more vigorously
in Hungary, this was chiefly because he was urged to do so by a party of
Hungarian magnates hostile to Matthias, and in 1463 he relinquished his
immediate claim in return (amongst other things) for a promise that he
or his heirs should inherit if Matthias died without male heirs. As for
Casimir, his children were also in their infancy, and he was too much
occupied in Prussia and Lithuania to turn south at that moment. He
preserved excellent relations with George, to the extent of refusing the
pope’s invitation to join a crusade against him on the ground that ‘he
did not understand how an anointed and crowned king could be de-
throned’. If his relations with Matthias were less cordial, he at any rate
usually found it prudent to keep his hands off that competent man’s
property, although intervening later, on his son’s behalf, in Silesia.

The failure of the two national kingdoms to outlive their founders is
due to those founders’ own fault — that of Matthias in incomparably the
greater measure: for if George was not innocent of certain rather dubious
intrigues, they never reached sufficient maturity to make them dangerous.
But Matthias had the gift of doing nothing, good or bad, that was not
significant ; and great king as he was in many respects, he brought neither
peace nor union to the Danube. He had begun by buying off the emperor,
cultivating the friendship of George, whose daughter he married, and
fighting lustily against the Turks, but he soon let himself be seduced by
dreams of western conquest, the naked ambition of which his country’s
historians vainly try to disguise as long-term strategic moves intended to
gather strength for more energetic prosecution of the war against the
Turks. His rule never produced the smallest feeling of solidarity between
the inhabitants of Hungary and those of the Austrian and Bohemian
provinces which he conquered, and the accession of Casimir of Poland’s
eldest son, Wladislaw Jagiello, to the Bohemian throne in 1479 was the
direct result of Matthias’s attacks on Podiebrad. For George had originally
meant his own elder son to succeed him, but in his extremity, in order

372

EASTERN EUROPE

to secure the support of Casimir of Poland against Matthias and the pope,
he in 1469 offered Casimir the succession to the Bohemian Crown for his
eldest son. When George died, two years later, no serious candidates
came forward for the throne except Wladislaw and Matthias, and while
Matthias insisted on the validity of his election, the national party elected
the fifteen-year-old Wladislaw, just as an earlier diet had elected his
father, for his negative qualities of not being (it was expected) dangerous
to Bohemia’s independence or her religion; safeguarding themselves in
both respects by binding Wladislaw to observe the Compactata and
assure religious peace in Bohemia, and to grant no offices in the state to
foreigners.

Meanwhile Matthias in his turn had failed to beget an heir to the
Hungarian throne, either by Catherine Podiebrad or by the beautiful
but uncomfortable Beatrix of Aragon whom he married in 1476, after
Catherine had died. His only issue was the bastard, John Corvinus, his
son by the daughter of a burgher of Breslau. In his last years he devoted
much of his time to endeavouring to assure that John should succeed
him. He offered Maximilian (now married to Mary of Burgundy) the
return of the Austrian provinces which he had seized between 1477 and
1485 if Maximilian would renounce the treaty of 1463 and accept
John as king of Hungary ; John was then to marry Maximilian’s daughter.
Agreement was reached in principle, although not sealed, in the autumn
of 1489, and Matthias then exacted an oath from the royal free towns
and from many dignitaries of Hungary, lay and ecclesiastical, that they
would accept John; he also secured the adoption of the Lex Palatinus
(a measure which, although failing of its immediate purpose, was to
retain its importance for many centuries) which gave the Palatine the
first vote on the succession ‘ should the royal seed die out ’ and made him
guardian of a minor king and viceroy during an interregnum, then
making his own creature and adherent, Imre Zapolyai, Palatine.

But on 6 April 1490, as he was on his way to a meeting from which
he expected the definitive agreement with Maximilian to result, Matthias
died, suddenly and prematurely. Imre Zapolyai had predeceased him,
and his successor had not yet been appointed. The smaller nobles, who
in their day had secured the election of Matthias, were for his son, but
the magnates, other considerations apart (and to do them justice, many
of them felt John’s illegitimacy to be a real stumbling-block), had found
Matthias’s strong rule much less to their taste than unconsolidated
conditions which allowed them to rule their own areas as petty kings.

Besides John, there were three possibilities: Maximilian, and two of
Casimir of Poland’s sons, Wladislaw, already king of Bohemia, and the
surviving brother next in age to him, Jan Olbracht. Both Maximilian
and Jan Olbracht were strong and able men, and both had their partisans,
but more of thfe great lords favoured Wladislaw, precisely because he was

373

THE RENAISSANCE

notoriously neither strong nor able. A harmless and friendly creature
with neither taste nor understanding for politics, he had earned in
Bohemia the nickname of King Dobre (King ‘All Right ’ — dobre meaning
‘good’) from his habit of assenting with that word to any proposal put
before him; and ‘a king whose plaits they could hold in their fists’, as
one of them cynically put it, just suited the Hungarian magnates. There
was long argument, much bribery and some fighting, but Wladislaw’s
partisans had taken the precaution of raising the money to keep tem-
porarily in being and in their service, the real force in the vicinity, Matthias’s
4 Black Army ’, then stationed in Silesia. John Filipec, bishop of Nagyvarad,
whose strong advocacy of Wladislaw’s cause may have owed something
to his own Moravian origin, hurried to Silesia with the funds which had
been hastily collected and brought back the army. J ohn Corvinus’s partisans
were soon defeated. John, who lacked either his father’s energy or
his ambition, renounced his pretensions in return for the title of duke of
Slavonia and the prospective Crown of Bosnia (when available). Jan
Olbracht was not anxious to press his claim against his elder brother
when the latter became the other candidate, a position reached in
the course of 1491. Maximilian, after reoccupying the lost Austrian
provinces, had invaded Hungary with a mercenary army, but he was
unable to pay his soldiers and they dispersed. He now agreed by the
Treaty of Pressburg (7 November 1491) to recognise Wladislaw as king
in return for recognition that the Austrian provinces were his, and the
promise of the succession for himself or his issue if Wladislaw died without
male heirs.

It is true that the agreement was never ratified in Hungary. The Habs-
burg connection was very unpopular in that country, and among the
many promises which Wladislaw had been forced to give when offered
the throne, was one to make no agreement with Frederick or Maximilian
without the consent of the diet. When Wladislaw brought the Treaty of
Pressburg before the diet in 1492, the lesser nobility refused to accept it;
but Wladislaw personally always considered it binding on himself, and
sixty-seven magnates signed a solemn declaration that, if Wladislaw died
without male heirs, they would vote for Maximilian or his heirs. Maxi-
milian contented himself with this, and Wladislaw’s throne was now
secure against any foreign pretender.

In the same year Casimir of Poland died. Now it was Wladislaw who
stood down in favour of his brother, the clear favourite of the Polish
electors, and Jan Olbracht became king of Poland, although, unlike his
father, not also grand duke of Lithuania. During Casimir’s rule there
had been considerable discontent in Lithuania over his alleged neglect of
Lithuanian interests in favour of Polish (especially when he failed to
give Novgorod effective support against Ivan) and Casimir had been
obliged to promise that a separate person should rule as grand duke of

374

EASTERN EUROPE

Lithuania, residing in Vilna. This prize now fell to the third surviving
brother, Alexander. The fifth brother, Frederick, was a cardinal; the
fourth, Sigismund, was left for the time without any special provision.

Hungary and Bohemia were now practically under single control, so
far as foreign policy was concerned, for although the diets of both
countries safeguarded themselves by various resolutions, to be described,
these could not affect the dynastic agreements which formed so large a
part of the real foreign policy of those days. Wladislaw and Jan Olbracht
agreed, at a meeting which took place between them on 5 May 1494,
mutually to intervene with all their forces should the subjects of either
rebel, or dissipate the royal revenues. The agreement did not bind its two
authors to a common foreign policy, but they concerted together on that
subject, both at the meeting in question and on later occasions, and it is
not impossible to make a single narrative of the foreign relations of
Poland and Hungary-Bohemia during the next twenty-five years; even
if that narrative will reveal discord as well as agreement, and many
events in which only one of the parties was concerned. As preliminary
to the story we may mention here that while Wladislaw ruled in Hungary
and Bohemia during the whole twenty-five years, Jan Olbracht died on
17 June 1501, and Alexander, who had succeeded him in Poland while
retaining the grand duchy of Lithuania, on 19 August 1506. Sigismund
then began that long rule over both Poland and Lithuania, which was to
end only in 1548.

Once Wladislaw and Jan Olbracht were settled on their thrones, the
story became for a time relatively simple, and except in one direction,
affecting Poland almost exclusively, relatively uneventful. The Balkans
were, for once, quiet. It is true that the local Turkish begs in Bosnia and
Serbia made several raids on Hungary’s frontiers in the first years after
Wladislaw’s accession, but the fortifications were then still in reasonable
condition, and the frontier captains — John Corvinus, the Frangepani in
Croatia and the famous old warrior, Pal Kinizsi — beat them back without
loss of territory. Fortunately for Hungary, the Sultan Bayezld was of a
mild and peaceable disposition and not inclined to undertake big adven-
tures; his only serious European war — that in which he was engaged with
Venice at the turn of the century — was probably undertaken from
defensive rather than aggressive motives. Hungary on her side could not
think of taking the offensive — in 1500 she refused an invitation from
Venice to do so — and, when the Venetian war was ended, concluded a
seven years truce with the sultan, which was renewed in 1510 and again
in 1513. By this time the war-like Sultan Selim had succeeded his father,
but was, during the first years of his reign, too fully occupied in the south
and east to trouble Hungary.

The Turkish capture, in 1483-4, of Kilia and Akkerman, and the estab-
lishment of Ottoman suzerainty over the Crimean Tatars (as also,

375

THE RENAISSANCE

intermittently, over Moldavia) had created a situation which the rulers of
Poland regarded as permanently dangerous to themselves and calling for
reversal, and Casimir had sent three expeditions across his southern
frontiers between 1483 and 1489, but they had not been successful. In
1489 he had concluded a truce on the basis of uti possidetis, and Jan
Olbracht renewed this for a further three years in 1494. He did not mean
this to be final, and employed the respite in preparing to launch a grand
attack to recover the two fortresses and cut the line between the Turks
and their Tatar satellites when it expired. This, again, was unsuccessful.
Olbracht had initiated conversations with Wladislaw with a view to
joint action, but in the course of them indiscreetly proposed that the
voivode (viceroy) of Moldavia, Stephen, whom he regarded as unreliable,
should be deposed in favour of the fourth Jagiello brother, Sigismund.
Wladislaw in any case regarded Moldavia as Hungary’s vassal, and refused
to take action against him, so that Olbracht was obliged to withdraw
his proposal, but it had been betrayed to Stephen. When, then, the truce
expired and the expedition was launched in 1497, Poles and Lithuanians
co-operating but Hungary standing aside, Stephen, who believed the
operation to be directed against himself, declared himself to be the sultan’s
vassal and attacked the Polish force, which had to retreat; neither did
the Lithuanians attain their objective. The Turks and Tatars raided Poland
heavily in retaliation. Olbracht had to patch matters up with Stephen,
recognising his independence, and negotiate another truce with the sultan ;
this was finally concluded in 1501, the sultan granting it the more
readily because it averted the threat that Poland might join forces with
Venice, which was then at war with the Porte. The Venetian delegates
had, indeed, urgently begged the Poles to join in the crusade proclaimed
by the pope when those hostilities opened. After this Poland, like
Hungary, regularly renewed the truce with the sultan until 1521, when
Casimir refused to do so.

Poland was almost continuously at war with Moscow, as the conse-
quence of the Muscovite policy of expansion mentioned above. Almost
the first sequel to the division between Poland and Lithuania which followed
Casimir’s death was that Basil, allying himself with the Crimean Tatars,
invaded Lithuania. Alexander was obliged to sue for peace, and to ask
that this should be sealed by a marriage between himself and Ivan’s
daughter, Helena; which Ivan granted, but only on condition that
Alexander recognised all his recent conquests and his title of ‘ Sovereign
of all Russia’. This did not bring lasting peace or stability, for more
frontier areas transferred their allegiance to Ivan, who accepted them
and in 1500 declared war again, using as pretext Alexander’s support
of the movement for union between the Greek and Roman Churches.
This time the war went on (outlasting Alexander’s succession to the throne
in Poland) until 1503, when Ivan granted peace again, once more on the

376

EASTERN EUROPE

basis of recognition of his gains. The position was now changed by the
deaths of both Ivan and Alexander. The Tatars, too, had been so thoroughly
worsted that they had actually changed sides, becoming Poland’s allies.
This encouraged Sigismund to take advantage of the confusion caused
in Muscovy by Ivan’s death and to demand the restoration of Ivan’s
conquests. Both countries moved their armies (the Russians actually
leaving their bases first), and the Poles at first had the better of the
fighting; but the rebellion of one of their leaders, a Christianised Tatar
named Glinski, disorganised their movements, and on 8 October 1508
Sigismund concluded a ‘perpetual peace’ with Muscovy, recognising
Ivan’s acquisitions. His chief profit was that he was now able to turn
on Stephen of Moldavia, who had invaded Galicia; although he had to
recognise Hungarian suzerainty over Moldavia.

During most of this period Poland had had few dealings, either friendly
or inimical, with the Empire, or with any of its components; while in
Hungary a remarkable situation had developed under the stress of the
internal dissension in that country, which was of dimensions sufficient to
affect the international position by threatening the stability of the throne.
As we have seen, the smaller nobles had hoped to see John Corvinus
succeed his father as king, and did not altogether renounce that hope
even after 1492. John, indeed, proved ineffective as rival to Wladislaw,
being apparently quite content to accept the settlement made with him
and to serve Wladislaw loyally (the only time he appears to have con-
sidered rebellion was when he had been disgracefully cheated of some
of his estates). But anti- Wladislaw feeling lived on, and the leadership
of this party was seized by the Zapolyai family, now risen to extraordinary
power. Imre Zapolyai’s brother Stephen was elected Palatine in 1490,
and held that office for ten years, during which he added substantially to
his already enormous fortune. He, in turn, died in 1500, but his energetic
and ambitious widow, nee duchess of Teschen, made no secret of her
intention to place one or the other of her sons on the throne.

The question of the Hungarian succession, meanwhile, remained in a
ridiculous position of stalemate, largely produced by Wladislaw’s
feebleness of character. In 1475, at the age of twenty, he had married
by proxy Barbara, daughter of Albert Achilles of Brandenburg, but had
never sent for his bride. In 1478 he had met Matthias’s young second wife,
Beatrix of Aragon, at the conquest of Olmiitz, and they are said to have
been struck by one another’s charms, which in both cases were more
than considerable, and as soon as Matthias died, Beatrix proposed that
Wladislaw should marry her, providing her simultaneously with a hand-
some husband and a crown. The Cardinal-Primate Bakocz married the
pair secretly in Beatrix’s lodgings, Wladislaw protesting the while that the
act was invalid, since he was already married. He was now safely tied up
without prospect of begetting lawful issue in any manner.

377

THE RENAISSANCE

In this situation Maximilian had every interest in keeping Wladislaw on
the throne, while Wladislaw for his part turned for support and encourage-
ment against his over-ambitious subjects to the man who at least was
willing to wait for his death. By 15 10 Maximilian had, as a contemporary
chronicler wrote, ‘long ceased to be the King’s enemy and became
instead his friend and counsellor’. Ambassadors from the emperor
travelled to Buda in quick succession, bringing the king advice and help,
and incidentally building up a pro-Habsburg party among the Hungarian
magnates ; in which task they achieved considerable success.

In 1499 the threads of Polish and Hungarian relations with the Empire
became entangled in curious fashion, and with paradoxical results. Up to
this date the Teutonic Order had for many years given no trouble to
Poland, and had also received no encouragement from the Empire. The
grand master during Casimir’s closing years, Tieffen, had been the
Polish king’s uncomplaining vassal and loyal collaborator, and he had
duly done homage to Jan Olbracht after Casimir died. But not all the
members of the Order had been contented with this relationship, and,
when Tieffen died in 1498, they decided to try to strengthen their position
and to gain support in the Empire, and offered Tieffen’s succession to
Frederick of Saxony, one of the leading princes of the Empire. Frederick
refused to do homage.

A Jagiello family conference, attended by Wladislaw, Sigismund (who
had been staying with his brother in Buda) and the cardinal, Frederick,
met in Pressburg in December 1499. The plan was evolved of seeking
alliance with France, and sealing it by the marriage of Wladislaw to Anne
de Candalle, niece of Anne of Brittany, and of Olbracht to henyounger
sister, Germaine. Louis XII accepted the proposal, and on 18 July 1500
a French embassy in Buda signed with Poland and Hungary a general
and perpetual alliance against the Turks and against all enemies, present
and future, the pope, the emperor and the king of the Romans excepted.

This done, Jan Olbracht turned on the Order, demanded the homage
and prepared to mobilise. Since, under the circumstances, neither the
emperor nor the imperial diet, who were, moreover, deeply divided by
their mutual quarrel, were willing to help him, the grand master yielded
and agreed to take the oath. Before he had done so, however, and also
before Olbracht’s marriage could take place, Olbracht died. The grand
master now delayed paying homage to Alexander. Thus the only imme-
diate result of the affair was the odd one that Wladislaw found himself
presented with a French wife; for, the pope having at last cut his Gordian
knot by declaring both his marriages invalid, he sent for his bride and
duly married her.

This did not affect Wladislaw’s relations with Maximilian, but Poland
was now at odds with the Empire, for Frederick persisted in his refusal
to do homage, and Maximilian, irritated by Olbracht’s action, encouraged

378

EASTERN EUROPE

him, and after Alexander had appealed to the pope and secured from him
a letter enjoining obedience from the Order, Maximilian got the pope to
withdraw the letter. Meanwhile, the queen of Hungary had given birth
to a daughter, named Anne like her mother. In 1504 John Corvinus died,
leaving two little children, a son, Kristof, and a daughter, Elisabeth.
The duchess of Teschen saw her chance : she quickly betrothed her younger
son, George, to Elisabeth Corvinus and, descending on Wladislaw,
demanded the hand of the little princess for her elder son, John, now
occupying the important office of voivode of Transylvania. The match
was pressed by Sigismund, whose heart at this time was entirely in the
anti-German policy.

The whole business seems to have been forced on Wladislaw by his
more energetic brothers, but at least he could summon up the deter-
mination not to give way to the Zapolyais. He put them off and appealed
to Maximilian. Extraordinary scenes took place in 1505. John Zapolyai
now linked his cause with that of the lesser nobles, as the cause of
national independence against the Habsburgs. The diet of February
threatened Wladislaw with deposition, but did no more than threaten:
a second diet, to meet in July, was expected to bring matters to a head.
Before this met, Wladislaw asked Maximilian for armed support, which
the imperial diet voted; but the German soldiers were late, whereas
Zapolyai, who had brought 2000 soldiers with him, was punctual, and
the diet passed a resolution, sparing Wladislaw himself (as Zapolyai had
previously agreed with the queen) but laying every evil from which
Hungary had ever suffered at the door of her foreign kings and swearing
never again to receive one.

Next year the queen gave birth to a boy, Louis, and the immediate
crisis passed over, Maximilian contenting himself with concluding an
agreement that the two children should marry two of Maximilian’s own
descendants. Thus relations between Hungary-Bohemia and the Empire
remained as cordial as ever, but Poland, where Sigismund was crowned
king on 24 January 1507, was not in this group and still at odds with
the Teutonic Order. Frederick was still refusing homage, and the Order
had, at the Congress of Marienburg (August 1 506), produced a plan for
abolishing the allegiance of East Prussia to the Crown of Poland and
uniting it with Royal Prussia, the united province then to be held by the
grand master as a fief of the Polish Crown. Protracted negotiations
went on, Hungary trying to mediate, while Sigismund was unwilling to
precipitate the issue at a moment when he wanted all his forces for his
enterprise against Basil. The conversations dragged on during the whole
course of Poland’s war with Muscovy and the first two years of the per-
petual peace. Then Frederick of Saxony died (14 December 1510), and
the Order elected for its new grand master the obscure and needy, but
enterprising and ambitious, Margrave Albrecht of Hohenzollern-Anspach,

379

THE RENAISSANCE

who promptly opened up negotiations, not only with Maximilian, but
also with Basil. Learning of this, Sigismund turned to the Hungarian
opposition, took to wife Zapolyai’s sister, Barbara, and concluded with
the Zapolyais a secret pact for mutual assistance against all enemies,
meaning thereby the Habsburgs. This was in 1512; and late in the same
year, Basil attacked Lithuania.

Fighting went on throughout 1513; meanwhile, Maximilian had learnt
of Sigismund’s treaty with the Zapolyais, and, seeing in this a threat to
his whole dynastic plans for acquiring Hungary and Bohemia, himself
sent an ambassador to Moscow (December 1513). The ambassador
(exceeding his instructions) concluded a far-reaching offensive alliance,
but this proved unpopular in Germany, where several of the princes were
reluctant to attack Poland for the sake of Habsburg family aggrandise-
ment; then, on 8 September 1514, the Polish-Lithuanian armies defeated
the Russians crushingly at Orsza. Thereupon Maximilian decided to
come to terms with Sigismund, who was himself ready to compromise,
since the prospect of seeing Russia, the Empire and the Order allied
against him was more than he cared to face. After some negotiation, a
preliminary agreement on the question of the Order was signed at Press-
burg on 20 May 1515, and a definitive treaty at Vienna on 22 July. By
the preliminary agreement, the emperor recognised the Treaty of Thom,
while Sigismund agreed that Poles should not be recruited into the Order,
and that all conflicts arising within the next five years between Poland
and the Order should be submitted to arbitration by the emperor and the
king of Hungary. The full congress saw the final settlement of the question
of the Hungaro-Bohemian succession. The little King Lewis (who had
already been crowned in 1508) was married to Maximilian’s grand-
daughter, Mary, while Anne Jagiello was betrothed to one of Maximilian’s
grandsons, Ferdinand, the emperor himself standing proxy and promising
to marry the child himself if Ferdinand proved recalcitrant (the marriage
in fact took place in 1521).

It is hardly possible to over-estimate the importance of this transaction.
As the event proved, it brought the Crowns of Hungary and Bohemia to
the Habsburgs only eleven years later. Some Hungarian historians argue
that this was a direct consequence of the agreement, for Louis XII might
never have egged the sultan on to attack. Hungary had he not regarded
it as a satellite of the Habsburgs; and it was certainly little else from 1515
onward. It also transformed, for a long period to come, Poland’s relations
with the Empire, for Sigismund now dropped his anti- German policy,
the more easily for the providential death of Barbara Zapolyai. On
12 April 1518 Sigismund married Bona Sforza (a marriage arranged by
the Germans), so that the extension of Italian influences in architecture,
art and letters, which was so marked a feature of Polish life in the following
years, admittedly owing much to Queen Bona’s personal influence, may

380

EASTERN EUROPE

also rank as a consequence of the Congress of Vienna. So, undoubtedly,
may Sigismund’s refusal to annex West Pomerania, which he could have
done soon after, and his rejection of an offer made to him by the national
party in Sweden of the Crown of that country.

The sufferers were the Zapolyai party in Hungary, the Teutonic Knights,
and Muscovy. John Zapolyai at the time took his defeat gracefully, and,
to do him justice, stirred up no trouble in the next few years. The Order
reopened its wearisome negotiations with Poland. The grand master
seems to have received some secret encouragement from the emperor, for
he used a very bold tone, and demanded as price for agreement, not only the
return of Royal Prussia, but compensation for fifty years’ occupation
by Poland On io March 1517, he concluded an offensive and defensive
alliance with Moscow, and the next year asked the emperor for military
support if Poland refused to accept his conditions; also approaching
Denmark, with more success. In December 1519 Sigismund declared
war, and there was heavy fighting; but on 5 April 1521 a four-year
truce was arranged through the mediation of the emperor and the king
of Hungary, who were to decide before its expiration whether the grand
master should or should not take the oath. Before the term had expired,
the whole position had been changed through Albrecht’s acceptance of
Luther’s advice that he should turn Protestant, marry, and transform
his ecclesiastical state into a secular one. Since the emperor was hostile
to the Reformation, this could not be done except in conjunction with
Poland, and Sigismund, who was anxious to be done with the wars, both
on internal grounds and in view of the renascence of the threat from
Turkey, accepted Albrecht’s proposals. A treaty was concluded in Cracow
on 8 April 1525. Albrecht received East Prussia under fealty to the Polish
Crown. The right of the successor to the newly created duchy was vested
in himself and his three brothers, and their successors; if their line died
out, the duchy was to revert to Poland. Three days later Albrecht did
public homage in the market-place of Cracow.

The fighting with Moscow had meanwhile proceeded intermittently,
Basil having succeeded in recovering the alliance of the Crimean Tatars.
Neither party could gain a decisive advantage, and an armistice was signed
on 2 September 1520, followed by a five-year truce on 14 September 1522.
Concluded on the basis of uti possidetis, this left Moscow in possession of
the fortress of Smolensk — a small but strategically very important gain.
The truce was renewed in 1526.

The family compact between Wladislaw and Jan Olbracht had related
to domestic affairs only in so far as it provided against actual rebellion,
and against the squandering (by the king’s subjects) of the royal revenues.
It may be remarked that the former case did not arise, or at least, not so
openly as to be used as a casus foederis, while the latter went on constantly,
but was, again, never made a justification for fraternal intervention.

2J 38l NCMH I

THE RENAISSANCE

There is no record of the two brothers, or their successors, ever going
beyond this in the co-ordination of their domestic policies. Still less did
the other political factors ever combine or even concert together; we do
not even find the diets of Bohemia and Hungary joining forces against
their common ruler. Nevertheless, institutions and conditions in all three
countries developed during this period along closely similar lines, a fact
which is only partly to be explained by like causes producing like effects
and must inevitably have been due largely to mutual influence and imitation.
Unfortunately the detailed comparative studies which would make
possible the treatment of the three countries’ internal histories from this
most interesting angle have yet to be written and it is not possible to do
more here than briefly to indicate the main developments in each country
separately.

Poland, whose constitutional structure had been much more primitive
and its development more belated, was in fact largely engaged in over-
taking Hungary. Now she was rushing through certain stages of an
evolution which Hungary had already left behind. One writes ‘Hungary’,
for whatever the facts may be regarding the origin of the Polish szlachta,
it is certain that at any rate by the thirteenth century this numerous class
of lesser nobles, politically and socially, bore a much closer resemblance
to the Hungarian koznemesseg of the day than to the Bohemian noble
classes; the resemblance would be more apparent still if the Hungarian
clan had been more closely and more intelligently investigated. The
status of the szlachta was then clearly further assimilated to that of the
koznemesseg by the Charter of Kassa granted to the Polish nobles in 1374
by the Hungarian king, Louis ; this being in the main a close adaptation
of the Hungarian Golden Bull of 1223. By a short time after this, the
szlachta had become a homogeneous class through the final disappearance
of the lower category of the wlodykes and the mutual assimilation
between the different Polish provinces; and the rights of its members to
various personal freedoms and immunities had been confirmed again and
again. The existence of these rights clearly limited the king’s power in the
sense that he could not undertake any enterprise, at home or abroad,
which was incompatible with those rights, but beyond that the szlachta
had no voice in the determination of policy. The only body consulted by
the king was his council, a small body composed of a few high officials ;
and he was not even bound to seek its advice, still less to accept it.

But in the fourteenth century the growing class-consciousness of the
szlachta begat in it a wish for a bigger voice in the control of affairs, and
a number of factors combined to enable it to make its wishes felt. Particu-
larly the development of military technique made the old insurrectio
almost useless ; the king required for his campaign better-trained armies,
native or foreign, which had to be paid ; but he could not take from the
szlachta, without their consent, more than the immutable two groschen

382

EASTERN EUROPE

per hide conceded in the Kassa Privilege. This put the szlachta in a strong
bargaining position, for the king really needed its consent to loosen the
purse-strings before he could undertake any major enterprise. His
position was further weakened by the uncertainty of the Polish succession :
every Polish king from Jagiello onward had to bargain with his subjects
if he wished to be sure of the throne for himself and his heirs.

Thus the fifteenth century saw the szlachta rise rapidly to the position
of partner with the king in the conduct of the state’s affairs. The beginnings
of something like a general representative system go back as far as 1404,
when the king, requiring an extraordinary levy, deputes members of the
council to deliberate with the body of the szlachta in each of the districts.
In 1454 — to mention only the principal stages — the king, in the Charter
of Cerekwice, reaffirms the principles of the szlachta of Great Poland and
promises not to alter these, and not to call on the ‘ insurrection ’* without
consulting the district seymniki, or local assemblies of the szlachta: these
promises are afterwards extended to other parts of Poland and certified
in the Charter of Nieszawa. By 1493 at the latest the technical arrange-
ments had taken form, and Poland possessed a three-fold representative
system, the local seymniki, the provincial seyms, composed of delegates
from the seymniki, and thirdly, the national seyms composed of three
‘orders’, the king, the council and the chamber of deputies, this last
consisting of delegates from the district seyms.

In theory nothing of this affected the prerogative of the king, for the
seym had to be consulted only when it was being asked for something
which it was admittedly entitled to refuse.* The famous statute nihil novi
of 1505 did not alter this: here again the king was simply reaffirming
earlier pledges. Even after this the king carried through many important
transactions, including the settlement with the Teutonic Order and the
regulation of the status of the towns and of the Jews, without consulting
the seym. But the existence of the seym obviously made it very much
harder for the king to override the szlachta' s rights by unilateral action.
Moreover, as conditions became more complex, the range of matters
which the king could decide without asking for supplies shrank steadily.
The seym was further apt to make the grant of each concession dependent
on counter-concessions which reduced that range farther still.

The new developments increased the power of the smaller nobles at
the expense not only of the king but also of the magnates. The latter were
not, indeed, legally a separate class, but a small clique of big families had

1 The wording of the Charter runs only ‘Null as novas constitutiones faciemus neque
terrigenis ad bellum moveri mandabimus absque conventione commune in singulis terns
instituenda.’ It seems clear to the present writer that ‘bellum’ must be understood as war
outside the frontiers of Poland, for the obligation of the szlachta to defend the country
against invasion was never questioned.

2 The Privilege of Mielnik, of 1501, which would have obliged the king to accept the
decisions of the senate, was afterwards regarded as not legally binding.

383 27-3

THE RENAISSANCE

in fact come to form the entourage of the court and to share between
them the great offices whose holders formed the old council, now the
senate. The chamber of deputies, which was composed exclusively of
the smaller nobles, formed a natural counter-weight to the senate and
even held in its hands the ultima ratio thanks to the requirement of unani-
mity for any decision taken in the seym ; although in practice no important
decision was ever held up by the veto of an individual or small group.

The szlachta also increased their power very greatly during the period
at the expense of the towns, and in particular, of the peasants. The Polish
peasant was not badly situated in the early fifteenth century. Many of
the villages owed their origin to colonisation, possessed a measure of
guaranteed self-government in their own affairs and paid fixed dues
which, with the fall in the value of money, had become as derisively small
as the nobles’ contribution to the treasury. The landlords, before they
turned to commercial farming, had no interest in sweating their peasants
to lay up larger stores of produce than could be consumed. Above all,
the peasants still possessed the right of free migration, which was cardinal,
since, in an age where the demand for labour exceeded the supply, no
landlord dared impose exorbitant conditions; his peasants could simply
leave him and take service elsewhere on better terms. Later in the
century conditions began to change owing to a variety of causes, of which
the possibility now arising of exporting cereals through Danzig was one,
although not perhaps so decisive a one as is sometimes said. But for this
and other reasons, including the transformation of the national defence
service from one in which they took personal part to one for which they
paid, the landlords were turning into commercial farmers, strongly
interested in securing cheap and abundant labour for the lands which they
were now beginning to farm directly, on an ever-increasing scale. The
diet of 1493 confirmed the earlier provisions under which a peasant
quitting his farm could do so only on certain dates and must leave land
and inventory in good order, besides providing a new tenant. But now
a series of laws were passed (1496, 1501, 1503, 1510, 1 5 1 1) forbidding
either the peasant or his sons (at first the prohibition applied only
when there was more than one son) to leave without his master’s consent,
and making more summary the procedure whereby anyone who did so
could be retrieved. Simultaneously, the peasant’s legal status was de-
pressed. The old self-government was abolished, the landlord’s bailiff
replacing the former village headman. The peasants had long been
subject to the patrimonial jurisdiction of their landlords in many respects,
but the possibility of appeal to the royal courts had been open to them
in certain cases. This was greatly restricted by laws of 1496 and 1501,
and in 1518 Sigismund finally renounced the right of deciding an appeal
by a peasant against his master where the latter was a private man (on
the Crown and Church lands appeal was still possible). Dues and corvees

384

EASTERN EUROPE

were increased, and the landlords, although not legally entitled to do so,
were now able to encroach largely on the former peasant land for the
benefit of their own farms.

The towns still retained their self-government and their rights and the
king negotiated separately with them for supplies. They were thus not
directly affected by the development of the seym, in which only Cracow
was, by usage, represented. But that development naturally increased
the political weight of the szlachta also against that of the towns; and
several other of the privileges extorted by the szlachta and notably that
of exemption from customs dues (enacted in 1406 and re-enacted in
1504, 1541 and on other, later occasions) were also to the disadvantage
of the towns. Local manufacture could not compete with the duty-free
imports from Germany. The position of the towns was further worsened
by the cessation of the old transit trade from the East when the Turks
established themselves on the north coast of the Black Sea.

In Poland the evil effects which many of these developments produced
later were not immediately apparent. The Polish kings of the Jagiello era
were a competent set, who held their country together well enough.
The survey which we have given of Poland’s foreign relations shows that
her actual losses (given the still existent possibility of a favourable outcome
of the compromise with the Teutonic Order) were small. Against them,
Sigismund incorporated Masovia in Poland in 1526, on the death of the
last princes of the Piast dynasty, who had reigned there till that date.
The Polish-Lithuanian relationship underwent fluctuations: after the
kingdom and the grand duchy had again come into one hand on the
death of Jan Olbracht, the Poles attempted to enforce a new union
(that of Mielnik) which stipulated the joint election of the king and the
grand duke. As Poland was not bound to elect a Jagiello, this would
have meant that the family’s hereditary right to the grand duchy
vanished. The Lithuanians, however, refused to ratify the union, although
they afterwards accepted Sigismund as their grand duke, notwithstanding
that he was also king of Poland. The question was raised again only at
a later date.

Affairs in Hungary proceeded more turbulently than in Poland, for
while in the latter country the developments of the 1490’s were a natural
sequel to those of the 1470’s, and they in turn to the decades before them,
there had intervened in Hungary the dynamic reign of Matthias Corvinus,
who had been much closer akin, both in the objectives of his policy and
in its methods, to the princes of the new age who were his contemporaries
in central and western Europe, than to his Slavonic neighbours. While
respecting the forms of the Hungarian Constitution, he had largely
disregarded it in practice, so that his rule came near to an enlightened
despotism and both the social and political development of Hungary
tended to follow western patterns.

385

THE RENAISSANCE

His death was followed immediately by a strong reaction which was
not, perhaps, so completely lacking in all reason as later Hungarian
historians have been inclined to maintain. The chief beam in the Hun-
garians’ eye had been the taxation levied on them by Matthias for the
upkeep of his ‘Black Army’. It is rightly said that, had the force been
kept in being, Hungary might have avoided the disaster of Mohacs.
But Matthias did not organise his standing army primarily for use against
the Turks, nor use it for that purpose. He only used a few mercenaries
on the southern frontier to supplement the banderia, and confined himself
there (after the first years of his reign) to defensive operations for which
these light forces sufficed. When he expanded his mercenary army into
a large force, and levied heavy taxation for its upkeep, this was in the
interest of his western campaigns, which brought his Hungarian subjects
no advantage and to which they were not legally bound to contribute.
Of his other measures, while many were to the ultimate benefit of the
nation, many again were undoubtedly oppressive in their immediate effects.

Nevertheless, his rule was still popular, not only with the peasants,
who long mourned him, but also with the lesser nobles whose favour he,
like Casimir of Poland, had courted, less by making them positive con-
cessions than by the heavy hand with which he dealt with the magnates.
It was a small clique of rich men, lay and ecclesiastical, who put Wladislaw
on the throne with the help of that very standing army which was such a
thorn in their flesh. The first requirement made by these men of the new
monarchy was that it should be weak; and having secured a man whose
general character answered that requirement, they proceeded to limit the
royal power drastically. Wladislaw was made to reinforce his coronation
oath with a written ‘Inaugural Diploma’ in which, besides repeating the
general and usual undertaking to respect all rights, privileges, immunities,
etc., he had to give specific undertakings regarding various points of
foreign policy (inter alia, as mentioned above, to make no agreement
with Frederick III or with Ma xim ilian ‘without the express, free and
voluntary consent ’ of the prelates and barons) and also of internal policy
(the consent of the bishops and barons was required before new coinage
could be issued and for various other purposes). He also had to agree
to rescind Matthias’s ‘innovations’, in particular the Florin Tax out of
which the Black Army had been kept up. The diet was to meet regularly,
and the king had to give a month’s notice before convoking it, and to
notify in advance what were the subjects he proposed to lay before it.
In 1507 the principle was finally established that no decree issued by the
king was of legal effect unless confirmed by the council of state, and a
most important bolt-hole was blocked in 1504 when it was declared
illegal for any county to offer the king any subsidy or contribution,
contrary to the ancient liberties of the kingdom, without the consent of
the entire diet.

386

EASTERN EUROPE

The royal power, thus closely limited even in law, was in practice
reduced to zero by Wladislaw’s personal feebleness. The Crown could still
have wielded very great power by thrifty husbanding and wise employment
of the important revenues which it should have derived from the crown
lands, the mines and the other regalia. But Wladislaw let the control of
these slip into the hands of the court clique, who plundered them for
their private advantage so mercilessly that the yield from them, by the
time it reached the treasury, was only a half, at times only a quarter, of
what it had been in Matthias’s days. Some of them were farmed out to
Hungarian or foreign speculators in return for advances of ready money ;
when these were spent, the wretched king resorted to selling the books
and pictures from Matthias’s collections. At times he literally had to beg
for charity in order to keep his court supplied with food and drink.

The complete elimination of the Crown as an effectual political factor
left the field open for a bitter struggle between the lesser nobility and the
magnates. On paper, the smaller men had the better of the contest. The
magnates had begun by limiting the membership of the council to four
high officials, four bishops and four barons: the diet forced through a
measure adding to this number sixteen representatives of the lesser
nobility. The small nobles were, of course, in a great majority in the diet,
which all nobles were entitled, and indeed, obliged to attend. In 1495 the
jurisdiction of the counties was affirmed to extend also to the magnates’
estates; it was laid down that the f dispan (lord-lieutenant) was elected by
and responsible to the county diet (in the election of which all nobles in the
county had a voice) and that no one in the county was exempt from his
jurisdiction. And in 1514 the small nobles achieved a remarkable
theoretical affirmation of their position. The diet of 1498 had resolved
on a general codification of Hungary’s constitutional law. This made
little progress for some years, but was then taken in hand by the jurist
Verboczi, himself by origin a member of the small nobility, although
second to none in the art of self-enrichment. Verboczi’s Tripartitum, as
his work was called, appeared just after the peasant rising to which we
shall come shortly and records the changes for the worse in the peasants’
status enacted after the rising. It emphasises the complete monopoly of
freedom and political rights enjoyed in Hungary exclusively by the nobles
— the ‘ populus Hungaricus' by contrast to the ‘misera contribuens plebs' .
Going on, it stresses very strongly the complete equality of status between
all members of the populus. They enjoy ‘one and the same liberty’; all
laws and usages apply equally to them all, except only that the wergild
is higher in the case of a ‘lord’. But that derives ‘not from freedom but
from office and rank’. The same work developed the famous theory of the
Holy Crown as a mystic entity symbolised by the physical crown itself,
but in the political sense consisting of two members: one the crowned
king, the other the corporate populus of which again every nobleman was

387

THE RENAISSANCE

a member. They are mutually complementary and inseparable, for nobles
elect the king, and the king is the source of nobility ; and the decision of
neither is valid without the consent of the other. Verboczi’s book (which
claims to be a codification of Hungarian customary law and probably rests
to a far greater extent that is commonly believed on genuine ancient
tradition) never received legal sanction, but was nevertheless invoked for
centuries as the authoritative statement of the Hungarian Constitution,
and its appearance greatly strengthened the position of the smaller nobles,
not only against the peasants and the burghers, but also against the mag-
nates, who, it is worth emphasising, not only (as in Poland) did not form
a separate class under the constitution, but were also not a homogeneous
body in other respects. Most of them were new men: the father of the
primate-chancellor, Bakocz, was a villein by status and a candle-maker
by profession : the later treasurer, known to history in three languages as
Fortunatus, Szerencses or Gluck, was a baptised Jew. The great power
which a few men exercised in these years was due simply to the chaotic
conditions which enabled those possessing the opportunity and the talent
to fish successfully in the troubled waters to draw enormous hauls out
of them. But this possibility in fact placed in the hands of the magnates
a de facto power which outweighed that constitutionally enjoyed by the
lesser nobility, so that the affairs of Hungary during these years were
controlled by the magnates and the direction of them depended on the
course of the unremitting intrigues which went on between their rival
factions. The very rights of the small nobles were no real source of strength
to them, for the obligation to attend the diet strained their resources
heavily: they could not afford to leave their farms for long periods, and
the magnates could literally starve them into submission by prolonging the
debates on controversial questions.

The condition of the Hungarian peasants moved downward in the same
way as that of the Polish, although at first more slowly. The diet of 1492
still confirmed the peasant’s right of free migration, limiting it by the
indirect method of reducing his temptation to do so, which it did by the
method of lowering all standards to the lowest admissible anywhere:
all landlords, including the king, were bound to impose all admissible
dues and these were also extended to the free districts and market towns
previously exempt from many of them; in 1498 also to the royal free
boroughs. In 1504 peasants were forbidden hunting or fowling. Then
in 1514 came the extraordinary and horrible incident of the Dosza
rising. The cardinal primate, Thomas Bakocz, aspired to the Papacy and
wished to acquire merit therefor. At the instance of the pope, Leo X, he
preached a crusade, for which some 100,000 peasants and other mem-
bers of the poorer classes volunteered. Since no person of high rank was
ready to take command of this multitude, Bakocz entrusted the leadership
of it to a Szekel professional soldier named George Dosza; then, taking

388

EASTERN EUROPE

fright, tried to disband the crusading army. Thereupon Dosza turned his
followers against the ‘lords’. He was defeated and taken prisoner after
severe fighting, in which his followers had committed frightful excesses;
he himself was put to death by indescribable tortures. Thereupon the
diet condemned all the peasants of Hungary, those of the royal free
boroughs alone excepted, to ‘real and perpetual servitude’, further
imposing on them dues and corvees far heavier than anything previously
in force.

Although more sensational and less gradual, the Hungarian anti-
peasant legislation was not severer than that of other countries, and left
its victims in no worse state, but Hungary could afford it less because of
her exposed situation; and this applied even more to the question of
defence. The abolition of the Black Army put the country back on the
banderia system unless foreign invasion occurred, when the levee en masse
could still be proclaimed. When, then, the Florin Tax had after all to be
reimposed, the lords bound to provide banderia claimed exemption from
it. Thus, one way and another, little tax was raised and few banderia kept
in being. The only part of Hungary where the defence system was not
utterly neglected was the southern frontier zone, where the garrisons were
maintained by the king and, in practice, usually paid for out of subsidies
granted by the pope, or Venice.

In Bohemia, to which Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia were reunited de
facto after 1490 (the Hungarian diet pertinaciously reserving its rights
and maintaining its claim to an indemnity which, however, was never
paid), the chief special problem was the religious one. The measure of
peace established between Catholics and Utraquists by the Treaty of
Kutna Hora was still very incomplete : the Utraquists steadily refused to
surrender the Compactata, or any of the main doctrinal or organisational
points which divided them from the Catholics; while, although many
efforts were made to mediate, the pope as consistently refused to continue
the Compactata. It was an armistice, not even destined to be of long
duration, since hostilities were to flare up again with the spread of Luther’s
teachings. Meanwhile, the sect known as the ‘ Unity of the Brotherhood ’,
which, for some reason, Wladislaw treated with a degree of favour, and
which had several powerful patrons among the nobility, and also among
the higher Utraquist clergy, made steady and rapid progress. In 1496 the
more radical party in it, known as the Amosites, seceded: the majority,
under a Brother Lukas, gradually moved over to less ascetic doctrines:
their members were now allowed to participate in worldly affairs by
occupying any kind of office. Considerable numbers of Czech nobles
now joined the sect, which came to hold an important middle place
between the two main antagonists.

The Bohemian nobles naturally took the same advantage of King
Dobre's weakness as did the Hungarian. In 1500 they produced a complete

389

THE RENAISSANCE

constitution, which gave the diet the power to vote taxes, regulate the
application of the yield of them, and fix the number of effectives necessary
for the national defence. The king had the right of disposing of the army
only in case of foreign attack. The provincial officials were elected by the
nobles and took the oath to the constitution. The king even lost his right
of pardon, the members of the supreme court were irremovable and their
verdicts irrevocable. In 1508 the estates took over the king’s debts, but
on condition that it managed the royal revenues.

Bohemia was thus, in all but name, an aristocratic republic. As in
Hungary and Poland, the nobles regarded themselves as the sole reposi-
tories of personal rights or political power: the constitution enunciated
the principle that they alone were free, the other classes of the population
were destined to servitude and any benefits enjoyed by them were of
grace and not of right. The position of the peasants underwent the same
deterioration in Bohemia as in the neighbouring countries. The consider-
able class of free or half-free peasants which had survived up to the Hussite
wars had been abolished after them by the adoption of the principle that
‘ whoever was not a lord, must have a lord ’ . In the first years of Wladislaw’s
reign the diet decreed that no peasant might leave his holding without his
lord’s consent; the lords agreed mutually not to receive migrants from
other estates. In 1497 the peasants’ servitude was legally affirmed, and
re-enacted in the constitution of 1500. As elsewhere, the lords were
turning increasingly to direct farming and agricultural industry, and the
dues and corvees heaped on the peasants increased accordingly.

The nobles also pursued an offensive against the towns, the conflict
here being often sharpened by religious and national antagonisms. The
towns came under the surveillance of the nobles and their liberties were
revised downward or cancelled. The burghers were forbidden to trade in
the country districts, and merchants were even arrested on the roads.
The constitution of 1500 excluded them from representation in the diet.
The burghers, however, who represented a considerable force, defended
themselves with spirit in a struggle which at times amounted to actual
civil war. In 1508 they recovered the right of representation and in 1517
a truce (the so-called Treaty of St Wenceslas) was concluded under which
the towns renounced the monopoly, granted under a decree of George
Podiebrad, of brewing and selling beer, while the nobles recognised their
autonomy and confirmed their right to representation on the diet.

The great difference in the social structure of Bohemia, as compared
with Poland or Hungary, was the absence of a large and vigorous class
to correspond with the Polish szlachta or the Hungarian koznemesseg.
Under the western influences which were strongest in Bohemia of all
three countries, a small number of great families (in Moravia, in 1480,
there were only fifteen of them) had secured recognition as a separate
hereditary class, whose members were not only nearly absolute sovereigns

390

EASTERN EUROPE

on their own estates, but also enjoyed the sole title to all the main offices
of state. The smaller nobility, known collectively as the rytierstwo
( Ritterstand , Order of Knights), held a position midway between the
magnates ( pani ) and the unfree classes.

The reign of Wladislaw saw the knights on the offensive, in Bohemia as
in the other countries, not only against the unfree population but also
against the magnates. In 1487 (Bohemia) and 1492 (Moravia) they secured
admission for a certain number of their representatives to the supreme
courts. In 1497 King Wladislaw laid down an agreed proportion in
which the two estates were to partition the principal offices of state be-
tween them. This represented a gain for the knights, who now secured a
share in these offices, but still left the magnates in the majority and in
possession of all the more important offices. The Bohemian oligarchy
(whose real power was, of course, increased here also by the impotence
of the king) thus enjoyed legally, and in even greater measure, a supremacy
which its Hungarian opposite numbers exercised only de facto.

The Bohemians were not superior to the Hungarians in the use which
they made of their opportunities. Here, too, the internal history of the
period is one of a sordid scrambling for spoils between rival cliques.
If the selfishness and anarchy brought less fatal results to the country,
this was because of its better fortune in lying further from the Turkish
armies. Having extracted from Wladislaw an undertaking that they should
not be bound to provide soldiers for use outside their own frontiers, the
Bohemian estates were able to watch, with detachment and even com-
placency, the gathering of the storms which were to overwhelm Hungary.

King Wladislaw died in Buda on 13 March 1516. The ten-year-old
Lewis had already been crowned in both Hungary and Bohemia, and in
neither country did the magnates of the court cliques raise any objection
to his succeeding, only to the suggestion that the emperor and Sigismund,
who had been appointed his joint guardians, were in any way entitled to
intervene in the countries’ affairs, which they took entirely into their own
hands. The situation in Bohemia developed into a struggle for power
and wealth between two cliques, headed by the two men whom Wladislaw
had appointed to be his son’s tutors: Zdengk Lev of RoZmital, first
burgrave of Prague, who represented the Utraquist party, and Bretislav
Svihovsky of Rosenberg, leader of the Catholics. Roimital was the
stronger at first, but his depredations caused such discontent that there
was real joy when the young king, arriving in the country for the first
time in 1522, replaced him by John of Wiirttemberg, and appointed as
regent Duke Charles of Miinsterberg, a grandson of George Podiebrad.
Ro&nital, however, was strong enough to get the decision reversed, and
the history of the country during its few remaining years of independent
existence was simply that of the internecine struggle between the leaders
and followers of the Catholic and Utraquist factions.

391

THE RENAISSANCE

The position was at least as bad in Hungary, where the court clique,
the most influential member of which was Lewis’s cousin, the Margrave
George of Brandenburg, plundered the revenues mercilessly, and withal
kept up an extravagant estate, so that less money than ever remained for
the national needs. Lewis actually disbanded his own bander ium and
several of the magnates followed his example. Opposition to this regime
came only from the rival magnates who wanted their share of the spoils,
for the smaller nobility was leaderless again; John Zapolyai had severed
his connection with them and retired to Transylvania, where, indeed, he
was consolidating a local near-principality of his own. The representatives
of the lesser nobility were even excluded from the royal council. Then
the situation in the Balkans grew menacing again. In 1 520 Sulaiman the
Magnificent succeeded his father Selim, and at once turned north. In
1521 he sent envoys to Lewis demanding tribute. This being refused, he
prepared to march on Buda, but it was necessary first to reduce the
fortresses on the Save and the Danube. Sabac and Belgrade were taken
after heroic defences, which their garrisons waged without help; for the
Palatine and Zapolyai, summoned by the king to lead relief forces, moved
so slowly that the operation was over before they arrived.

Now the country awoke to the need of defence, and, remembering the great
days of Matthias, the diet of December 1521 enacted a law which accepted
the principle of a general tax for the establishment of a standing mercenary
army; but this was to replace, not to supplement, the earlier system.
At the same time, the lords were relieved of the obligation of maintaining
banderia, and the lesser nobles of obeying the levee. Little of the tax,
incidentally, was ever levied, and of that little a substantial part vanished
into the pockets of the Palatine and other officials, or of Szerences, who
managed and manipulated many of the king’s financial affairs.

Hungary was again granted an undeserved respite through Sulaiman’s
decision to take Rhodes before following up his campaign in the north ;
but instead of strengthening her defences, Hungary seized the opportunity
to invade Wallachia and establish her suzerainty there.

Messengers were sent abroad to beg for help. The imperial diet of
Niirnberg was impressed by the fall of Belgrade, and sent a commission
to Vienna to discuss matters with the Archduke Ferdinand (now married
to Anne Jagiello) and the Bohemian and Hungarian representatives.
But the great conflict between the Habsburgs and France had just broken
out. The Germans had few men to spare and only granted Ferdinand
3000 men, whom he sent down to Croatia. Renewed entreaties in 1523,
1524 and 1525 brought no better results. As for Lewis’s own Bohemians,
Rosenberg’s Catholic party was willing to give a little help, but the diet,
which had, as we saw, safeguarded its constitutional rights, answered
to Louis’s appeal that ‘ if he sent a cartload of such letters, written in gold,
they would not obey’. The only real help — and that on a minute scale —

392

EASTERN EUROPE

came from the pope ; the latter sent a nuncio to Hungary (Baron Antonio
Burgio) who himself raised and paid for a small force of mercenaries
from Moravia. Sigismund of Poland, too, wanted to help : he refused to
renew the truce with the sultan, and sent a small force to Hungary, but
the Turks, with Tatar help, ravaged Ruthenia, Volhynia and Podolia
cruelly, and he needed all his soldiers for himself. It was in connection
with these raids that the organisation of the Cossacks, as a special defence
force for the southern and south-eastern frontiers of Poland and Lithuania,
began to take shape; the first bill of enrolment for the Cossacks dates
from 1524.

In Hungary the years 1525 and 1526 were largely filled with a violent
struggle between the rival cliques of the magnates, and the lesser nobles,
each party blaming the other for the state of the country. In 1525 the
small nobles succeeded in forcing through the appointment of Verboczi
to be Palatine, but he was overthrown next year ; and truth to tell, he had
been no more constructive than his opponents. And in that year there
came the famous advances by Francis I to the sultan, which sealed the
fate of Hungary.

At the beginning of 1526 quite certain information reached Buda that
the sultan was preparing to move, and in April he began his slow march
northwards with an army of 100,000 men and 300 cannon. The Hungarian
diet of that month ended in its members disclaiming responsibility if
the king did not raise and apply the resources which, they said, the country
could produce, while the king replied that the resources were insufficient
and he was not to blame if disaster occurred. The sultan himself moved
slowly, but sent the Grand Vizier Ibrahim ahead to attack the fortress of
Petervaradin, which guarded the passage across the Danube. It was
stubbornly defended, but fell at the end of July. A few days earlier the
general levee had been proclaimed, and Lewis himself set out from Buda
with a force of 3000 men, all that was then available in the capital. He
moved down the right bank of the Danube, marching slowly to give
time for the banderia and the detachments from the different counties to
join him, but made things worse by sending out confused and contra-
dictory orders. Zapolyai, who arrived with his Transylvanians too late
to take part in the decisive battle, was afterwards freely accused of having
delayed purposely; but the fact is that he received four sets of orders,
the first of which commanded him to invade Wallachia, while the later
instructions to link up with the king’s army reached him too late. The
same thing happened to Kristof Frangepan, commanding the Croat
levies, which were reinforced by the German troops; but he and Zapolyai
begged the king not to join battle before they arrived. The Hungarians with
the king refused to move without him, and this allowed the sultan to cross
the Drave unimpeded at Eszek. It was to prevent defections that, when
the king learned that the Turkish army was drawn up in front of Mohacs,

393

THE RENAISSANCE

he determined to give battle without waiting for his reinforcements,
although his entire army consisted only of some 16,000 Hungarians and
half as many Polish, German and Czech mercenaries. On 29 August this
little force was drawn up south of Mohacs, awaiting the Turks’ advance.
To encourage his followers, the young king, with his entire government,
led the very centre of the line. Paul Tomori, the archbishop of Kalocsa,
on whom the command had been forced, believed that by attacking the
sultan’s Roumelian advance-guard quickly he could disperse them before
the main army came up. The main force was, however, nearer than he
expected, and when the Hungarians drove the Roumelians back, them-
selves disorganised by the fighting, they found that they had run clean
into the sultan’s guns. About 15,000 of the little force fell, including many
of its leaders. Lewis himself was wounded. Two of his aides-de-camp got
him away from the field; but as they were crossing a marshy stream, the
king and one of his two attendants were drowned. The other reached
Buda to tell the country that its army was lost and its king dead.

394

CHAPTER XIV

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1481-1520)

S ultan Mehemmed II (1451-81) had striven throughout his reign
to realise one dominant aim: the consolidation of the Ottoman
State. In 1453 he had conquered Constantinople which, impoverished
and greatly depopulated during the last years of Greek rule, was to become
once more, under his guidance, the proud capital of an empire. The
sultan repaired the ancient walls and peopled the empty spaces of the
city with groups of Muslims, Christians and Jews taken from all parts
of his realm. Public buildings were erected, like the great mosque which
he founded, with its baths and hospital, its accommodation for travellers,
and its colleges where students were trained in the law of Islam. Constan-
tinople was transformed into Istanbul, an imperial city which, reflecting
in itself the rich and complex character of the Ottoman State, bound
together the provinces of Anatolia and the Balkan lands as Adrianople,
the former capital of the empire, could not do.

Consolidation was also the objective behind the ceaseless campaigns of
the sultan. In 1459 the last remnants of independent Serbia were converted
into the Ottoman frontier province of Semendria, the strong bridgehead
of Belgrade, besieged in vain by Mehemmed in 1456, being left however
to the Hungarians. Bosnia was overrun in 1 463-4. The Bosnian aristocracy
largely embraced Islam and played henceforth a great role in the defence
of the frontier and in the attacks launched against Hungary and Austria.
In Greece, the principality of Athens, held by a Florentine family, the
Acciaiuoli, and the Greek Despotate of the Morea, ruled by the Palaeologi,
were subjugated in 1458-60; while in the Aegean Sea the islands of Thasos
and Samothrace, Imbros and Lemnos were taken over in 1455-6, and
Lesbos in 1462. During a long war with Venice (1463-79) Negroponte
fell to the sultan in 1470; but it was not until the Albanians, the allies of
Venice, had weakened in their resistance after the death of their leader,
Scanderbeg, in 1468, that the Ottomans secured a firm hold on the
Adriatic littoral through the capture of Croia and Scutari in 1478-9.

The Black Sea became an Ottoman lake. Genoese Galata, a suburb
of Constantinople, had been forced to submit to Mehemmed in 1453,
Genoa being thus severed from her maritime empire in those waters.
In 1461 Ottoman control was established over the southern shore of the
sea, where Amastris, a centre of Genoese interests, together with the
Turkish emirate of Kastamuni, including its port of Sinope, and also the
Greek ‘empire’ of Trebizond yielded to the sultan. The northern shore was
secured in 1475 when the Ottoman fleet seized the old Genoese emporium

395

THE RENAISSANCE

of Kaffa in the Crimea. Even the khan of the Krim Tatars now became
a vassal of the Ottomans. In Anatolia most of Karaman, a Turkish
principality which had long been a dangerous foe in the rear of the
Ottoman State, was taken over in the years after the death of its ruler,
Ibrahim Beg, in 1464. Princes of the old ruling house continued to resist
in the mountainous regions of the land, thus necessitating further Ottoman
campaigns, as in 1470 and 1474 ; but, although the tradition of independence
remained alive for more than a generation after these events, Karaman
was henceforth an integral part of the sultan’s dominions.

In spite of these achievements the work of consolidation was not
complete when Mehemmed died in 1481. In Europe the Ottoman hold
on the Christian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia was not yet
assured. Wallachia, ravaged by the Ottomans in 1462, had given less
trouble than Moldavia which, led by its able ruler, the voivode Stephen
(1457-1504), had defeated the Ottoman frontier warriors of the Danube
provinces on the River Racova in 1475. Although this reverse had been
avenged in 1476 when Mehemmed had routed the Moldavians at Valea
Albd, the Ottomans had still to win control over the estuaries of the
Danube and the Dniester, in order to establish safe land communication
with the Crimea. On the north-western frontiers of the empire, the
Hungarians retained Belgrade and parts of Bosnia; while the Venetian
fleet had at its disposal a number of strong bases on the Adriatic and in
the Morea.

To the east, tension had grown in the later years of Mehemmed’s
reign with two neighbouring Muslim Powers — with Mamluk Egypt over
the buffer state of Albistan, ruled by the house of Zu’l-Kadr and regarded
by the Mamluks as their protectorate, and with Persia because the state
lately founded there by Uzun Hasan was a serious threat to Ottoman
Anatolia. Originally the chief of the Turcoman tribes known as the Ak
Koyunlu, who had dominated the region around Diyarbekir, Uzun Hasan
(14237-78) had started on a career of conquest which, in the years after
1453, had made him master of western Persia, Azerbaijan, and Kurdistan.
As the ally of Venice during her war with Mehemmed, he had invaded
Anatolia, only to be repulsed at the battle of Terjan in 1473. None the less,
the Ottoman frontier towards the Ak Koyunlu State remained ill-defined
in 1481, and so, too, the frontier towards Mamluk Syria.

Mehemmed had raised to the status of a law the old Ottoman custom
that a sultan, on ascending the throne, should eliminate all possible rivals
by having his brothers and their male children put to death ; but he had
left the problem of the succession itself undecided. When he died on
3 May 1481 two sons survived him, Bayezid and Jem, each of whom, in
accordance with the Ottoman procedure that princes, from an early age,
should learn how to govern, had charge of a province in Anatolia.
Bayezid, the elder son, was at Amasia, and Jem at Konia, the old capital

396

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

of Karaman. A conflict between them was unavoidable. It would be
resolved in favour of the prince fortunate enought to win the allegiance
of the janissaries and the great officials of state. The high dignitaries
were divided amongst themselves but several of them, including the
beglerbeg, that is the governor-general, of Anatolia and, according to
some of the sources, the agha in command of the janissaries, were married
to sisters or daughters of Bayezid and were therefore staunch advocates
of his claim. It is true that no less a figure than the grand vizier was the
head of Jem’s party, but this man, Mehemmed Pasha, was a most un-
popular personality.

Sultan Mehemmed had died at Maltepe, not far from Scutari opposite
Istanbul, at the commencement of a new campaign. The grand vizier
concealed the sultan’s death and sent messengers to Amasia and
Konia, hoping that Jem would arrive before Bayezid. To prevent the
janissaries still encamped at Maltepe from crossing to the capital, he
returned to Istanbul and ordered the landing-places on the shores of the
Bosphorus to be closed and all available shipping to be seized. His
efforts were in vain, for the secret filtered out and the janissaries, rising
in revolt, secured ships on the Anatolian shore, crossed the strait from
Scutari, and slew him. At the same time the messengers bound for
Konia were caught and held on the command of the beglerbeg of Anatolia.
In order to ensure the accession of Bayezid, his partisans raised to the
throne one of his sons, Korkud, until Bayezid himself should arrive from
Amasia. Thus, when Bayezid reached Istanbul on 20 May 1481, he was
at once proclaimed sultan.

Jem, driven to armed resistance, gathered in Karaman and among the
Turcoman tribes of the Taurus mountains, the Varsak and the Torghud,
a powerful force which enabled him to take the old capital of his fore-
fathers, Brusa, where he assumed the title of sultan. His troops, however,
were no match for the janissaries. Defeated at Yenishehir in the neigh-
bourhood of Brusa (20 June 1481), he sought refuge in Egypt with the
Mamluk Sultan Ka’it Bay (1468-95). Just at this time Kasim Beg, of
the dispossessed house of Karaman and hitherto an exile in Tabriz at the
court of Uzun Hasan’s son Ya'kub Beg (1478-90), had invaded his
ancestral lands but had been driven into Cilicia. He and Jem joined
forces in the spring of 1482 and made a vain assault on Konia in June.
Jem, despairing of success, fled to Rhodes where he found asylum with
the Knights of St John (26 July 1482).

The knights, knowing how eager Bayezid was to gain possession of
so dangerous a claimant to the Ottoman throne, sent Jem to France in
September 1482. They undertook to keep the prince in safe confinement
when Bayezid promised to refrain from all hostilities against Rhodes
and, after further discussion in December 1482, to pay them a yearly
pension of 45,000 Venetian ducats. To secure control of Jem, the Christian

28 397 NCMH I

THE RENAISSANCE

Powers and even the Mamluk sultan began a long series of negotiations
and intrigues, in the course of which the knights agreed, in i486, to place
him under the control of Pope Innocent VIII, who, once he had the
prince in his care (1489), came to an understanding with Bayezld in
November 1490 and received thereafter the pension formerly paid to the
Knights of Rhodes. In 1494 emissaries from Pope Alexander VI alarmed
Bayezld with the news that Charles VIII of France, then on the point
of invading Italy (ch. xn), might well make use of Jem in a crusade against
the Ottomans ; but the sultan’s fear was soon dispelled, for, although the
pope was indeed forced to hand over Jem to Charles VIII in January 1495,
the prince died in February of the same year.

Almost fourteen years of Bayezid’s reign had passed under the constant
danger that a coalition of Christian Powers, using Jem as their instrument,
might invade the Ottoman empire. Neither in the west nor in the east
could the sultan commit his forces to a definite fine of action. There were,
indeed, various armed enterprises, but these were either raids due to the
initiative of governors in the frontier provinces or campaigns strictly
limited in scope. As long as Jem was alive, the Ottoman military machine
was never irretrievably engaged in a great war.

In Europe along the frontier marked by the rivers Sava and Danube,
from Bosnia to the Black Sea, Muslim and Christian border lords waged
against one another a ceaseless guerilla warfare which the central authorities
on both sides were impotent to hold in check. The Ottoman begs of
Bosnia and Semendria must have regarded the death of Sultan Mehemmed
as a specially favourable opportunity, for in 1481 their raids into Hungary
became so menacing that, in reprisal, the Hungarian governor of Temesvdr,
Pal Kinizsi, laid waste the province of Semendria in November of that
year. In the spring of 1483 the sultan repaired and strengthened the
frontier defences along the river Morava. At the same time, he established
full Ottoman control over the Herzegovina. Of all the Bosnian lands,
only a small area in the north, guarded by the Hungarian-held fortress
of Jajce, remained outside the Ottoman dominions. Neither Bayezld nor
the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus (1458-90), was eager for a serious
conflict, and hostilities ended in 1483 with a truce for five years, later
extended until 1491.

The death of Matthias and the ensuing dissension amongst the Hun-
garians over the choice of a new king (ch. xm) induced the Ottomans
to attack once more when the truce came to an end. Hostilities took the
form of massive raids directed not only against Hungary, but also against
Croatia and the Austrian lands — Styria, Carniola, and Carinthia. The
great incursions of 1492 brought swift and terrible ruin to the Christians.
None the less, one raiding column, as it returned laden with plunder and
captives, was trapped by the men of Carinthia near Villach„ where a
desperate battle was fought in which 10,000 Muslim warriors and 7000

398

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Christians are said to have been slain; while other raids into Hungary
were repulsed at Szoreny and at the pass of the Red Tower in Transylvania.
The incursions were renewed in 1493 with increased ferocity, Croatia and
lower Styria being ravaged once more and the Croat nobility almost
annihilated at Adbina on 9 September. There were further attacks on
Styria and Temesvar in 1494, to which the Hungarians retaliated by
devastating the region around Semendria in November. Peace was
restored in 1495 when the sultan, worried by recent developments in
Italy, concluded a truce with Hungary for three years.

While Jem was a captive in Christian hands, Bayezld himself made
a notable campaign against Stephen, prince of Moldavia (p. 396). On
15 July 1484 he took the fortress of Kilia on the Danube estuary; and
on 9 August, after the khan of the Krim Tatars, Mengll Girai, had
brought a large force of horsemen to his aid, he seized Akkerman at the
mouth of the Dniester. Stephen now turned to Poland for assistance,
recognising Casimir IV as his overlord at Kolomea on 15 September 1485 ;
but, although in November of the same year, near Katlabug in southern
Bessarabia, he succeeded, with the help of a Polish contingent, in repelling
the Ottoman frontier warriors of the Danube led by Malkoch-oghlii
Bali Beg, he could not recover Kilia and Akkerman. Poland, harassed
by the Tatars of the Volga, was unable to give him effective aid. In 1487,
therefore, he sent tribute once more to the sultan. Poland herself made
peace with Bayezld in 1489 in the form of a truce which was prolonged
in 1492 and again in 1494, on this latter occasion for a further period of
three years.

In the east, the unsettled conditions along the Taurus frontier led to
a war with Egypt which claimed an ill-defined protectorate over Cilicia
and the neighbouring principality of Albistan. The latent hostility between
the Ottomans and the Mamluks was brought to a head by the intrigues
and alliances, now with Egypt and now with the Ottomans, of the local
dynasties which ruled in this ‘ no-man’s land ’. To the west in Cilicia, in
the region around Adana and Tarsus, the Ramazan-oghlii were vassals
of the Mamluk sultan. The Mamluks even laid claim to the lands beyond
the Taurus because in 1464, on the eve of the Ottoman conquest (p. 396),
Ishak, a prince of the old ruling house of Karaman, had belatedly placed
himself under the protection of Egypt. To the east of Cilicia the buffer
state of Albistan dominated the route down the Euphrates. Because of
its great strategic importance, the Mamluks had long striven to maintain
a firm hold over this principality, but with no enduring success. Through-
out Cilicia and Albistan, powerful Turcoman tribes, the Varsak and the
Torghud, ever eager for warfare and plunder, added to the instability of
the Taurus frontier.

Friction between the Mamluks and the Ottomans had arisen in 1465
when, on the death of Arslan Beg, prince of Albistan, two of his brothers,

399 *8-2

THE RENAISSANCE

Budak and Shahsuwar, had fought against each other for the throne.
At first Budak had been successful with the help of the Mamluk sultan
Khushkadam (1461-7), who had also encouraged the princes of Karaman
in their conflict with the Ottomans. In 1467, however, Shahsuwar had
appealed for aid to Mehemmed II, who was himself married to a princess
of Albistan, and, having received from him investiture as ruler of the land,
had driven out Budak Beg. For some years Shahsuwar defied the efforts
of Ka’it Bay, sultan of Egypt, to evict him, but in the end he was captured
and then executed at Cairo in 1472. Budak Beg now returned to Mar'ash,
the chief town of the principality, to rule there as a vassal of the Mamluks.
In order to have a free hand in dealing with Albistan, Ka’it Bay had
refrained from aiding the Karaman-oghlii in their resistance to the
Ottomans and had assured Mehemmed that, far from wishing to exert
full control over Albistan, he had acted only because of a personal
grievance against Shahsuwar. It was, however, clear that he meant to
exclude the Ottomans from all influence in the land, a policy which was
successful until 1480 when Mehemmed, free to intervene once more,
established ‘Ala ad-Daula, a younger brother of Budak Beg, as prince
of Albistan.

Ottoman relations with Egypt became worse after the death of Sultan
Mehemmed, for Ka’it Bay, as we have seen, aided Jem against Bayezld
in 1481-2. The Ottomans complained, too, that the Mamluks were inciting
the Turcoman tribes to make incursions into Karaman and that pilgrim
caravans bound for Mecca were being molested in the Cilician passes.

Serious warfare did not begin until 1485 when Karagoz Pasha, the
Ottoman governor of Karaman, marched into Cilicia and seized Adana
and Tarsus. In retaliation, Ka’it Bay had Karaman raided by the Turco-
mans and sent to Cilicia a force of Mamluks which took the Ottoman
troops by surprise. Reinforcements came to their relief under Hersek-
oghlu Ahmed Pasha, beglerbeg of Anatolia, now appointed to be general
in command of the campaign. Karagoz failed to co-operate with
the beglerbeg, stood aloof from the fighting and thus by his inaction
caused the defeat and capture of Ahmed Pasha. On hearing of these
reverses, Bayezld made careful preparation for a new campaign. In 1487
the Grand Vizier Da’ud Pasha occupied Cilicia without resistance, the
Mamluks withdrawing before his superior forces, and then, on the advice
of ‘Ala ad-Daula who had taken the Ottoman side, set out to punish the
Varsak and Torghud Turcomans. In the next year ‘All Pasha assumed
command in Cilicia with a strong army which included the sipahis,
i.e. the feudal cavalry, of Rumeli and Anatolia as well as a large contingent
of janissaries. To repel this threat, a Mamluk army, reinforced by troops
drawn from Damascus, Aleppo and Tripoli and by Turcoman warriors
under the Ramazan-oghlii and the Torghud chieftains, advanced towards
Adana. Near this town a battle was fought on 17 August 1488, after

400

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

which ‘Ali Pasha had to retire from Cilicia. This further Ottoman defeat
caused ‘Ala ad-Daula to desert to the Mamluks ; whereupon his brother
Budak Beg, since 1480 an exile in Damascus, fled to Istanbul. Bayezid
ordered the troops of Amasia, Kaysari, and Karaman to restore him to
the throne of Albistan; but this attempt failed in 1489, Budak Beg being
captured and sent to Egypt. In 1490 ‘Ala ad-Daula, supported by a
powerful Mamluk army, invaded Ottoman territory and laid siege to
Kaysari. Unable to take the strongly fortified town, the Mamluks ravaged
the surrounding lands until lack of supplies and the approach of a large
Ottoman force compelled them to withdraw.

Both sides were now willing to make peace. The attention of Bayezid
was diverted once more to Hungary where Matthias Corvinus had died
in April 1490; while Ka’it Bay was eager to end an expensive war financed
only by the imposition of harsh measures which aroused discontent in
Egypt. In these circumstances, an agreement was soon reached in 1491.
After six years of inconclusive warfare, Egypt was recognised in her
possession of Cilicia but the revenues of Adana and Tarsus were to be
devoted to the sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina.

To all appearance, Sultan Bayezid had met with a major reverse in
failing to take Cilicia. And yet in no phase of the war had he exerted the
full weight of his military power — for Jem was still alive. The forces which
he had sent to Cilicia had consisted, for the most part, of sipahls from the
provinces of Anatolia, with detachments of janissaries and sipahls from
the Balkan lands to aid them when need arose. Compared with this
limited use of the Ottoman might, the Mamluks, in their war effort, had
gone to much greater lengths. The campaigns of 1488-9 had absorbed
a large proportion of their resources. Even so, the situation on the Taurus
frontier in 1491 was in no wise more favourable for the Mamluks, despite
their victories in Cilicia, than it had been before the war. One fact was
clear : the time was approaching when the Ottomans would seek in earnest
to solve the problems of this frontier. When the critical moment came,
the Mamluks would have to meet all the formidable strength of the
Ottoman war machine.

The death of Jem in 1495 set Bayezid free at last to pursue a more enter-
prising policy ; but before he could make use of this new freedom he had
to meet a threat from Poland. The Polish king Jan Olbracht (1492-1501),
unwilling to accept the fact that from the Crimea to the Danube the
Ottomans and the Krim Tatars together blocked Poland’s access to the
Black Sea, hoped to break this barrier with Moldavian aid. The voivode
of Moldavia, Stephen, who had sworn allegiance to Poland in 1 485 after
the loss of Kilia and Akkerman but, disappointed by Poland, had later paid
tribute once more to the sultan, had no wish to be a Polish vassal in fact as
well as in name. Moreover, the Hungarians, too, claimed a protectorate
over Moldavia and might be expected to resent Polish intervention.

401

THE RENAISSANCE

These complications did much towards the failure of the Polish
campaign of 1497 which aimed at the conquest of Kilia and Akkerman
but became, in fact, an invasion of Moldavia when the voivode, doubting
the true intentions of Jan Olbracht, appealed for aid to the sultan. The
Poles, after an unsuccessful assault on the Moldavian fortress of Suceava,
were compelled to retire through lack of supplies and the approach of
winter. Their withdrawal became a wild retreat when the Moldavians
defeated them at Kozmin in the Bukovina (26 October 1497).

Bayezid, angered by this Polish attack on his vassal, ordered the great
frontier warrior Malkoch-oghlii Bali Beg, the governor of the Danubian
province of Silistria, to invade Poland. In the spring and summer of 1498
Bali Beg, reinforced by Moldavian and Tatar horsemen, laid waste
Podolia and then Galicia as far as Lemberg; but a second incursion
launched against Galicia in the late autumn of the same year came to
grief in bitter snowstorms on the Carpathians. Abiding memories of
Bali Beg’s terrible retreat have survived in Roumanian folk ballads. The
door was closed against further raids when in April 1499 Jan Olbracht
made peace with the voivode of Moldavia. Bayezid, however, being now
on the verge of war with Venice, had no desire to prolong hostilities and
therefore consented to renew the former truce with Poland.

After the death of Jem, Bayezid could not ignore the growing pressure
from those of his advisers who urged that it was time to renew the assault
against the Christians. In the end, it was Venice which had to face a
major Ottoman offensive, despite the fact that relations between the
sultan and the signoria had remained tranquil since 1482 when Bayezid,
anxious to maintain peace in the west during his conflict with Jem, had
confirmed on more favourable terms than before the Venetian trade
privileges within the Ottoman empire. The war, when it came, arose not
so much from precise and determinable grounds of dispute as from ten-
sions inherent in the general alignment existing between the two Powers.
Ottoman domination on the Adriatic shore would remain incomplete so
long as Venice held, in Dalmatia and Albania, important territories like
Sebenico and Spalato, Zara, Budua, and Antivari, Dulcigno and Durazzo.
The same was true of the Morea where Venice was mistress of Lepanto,
Modon, and Coron, Navarino, Napoli di Romania, and Monemvasia.

To defend these possessions, Venice made use of Greek, Cretan, and
above all Albanian mercenaries, who were no less bent on plunder than
the Ottoman frontier warriors whom they opposed. ‘Incidents’ were
therefore common enough. Moreover, there was friction at sea where
Christian pirates using Venetian harbours and Muslim corsairs from the
Ottoman coasts and islands were both numerous and active. Venice was
alarmed at the growth of the Ottoman fleet, for in the years after 1496,
at ports in the Aegean and the Adriatic, the sultan built many vessels of
war and manned them by recruitment among the corsairs.

402

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

War became imminent in 1498-9 when hostilities flared out with a
growing intensity along the frontiers from Dalmatia to the Morea.
Venice complained of Ottoman raids on Sebenico and Spalato; while
Bayezid was angered to learn that Venetian mercenaries had ambushed
500 Ottoman soldiers near Napoli di Romania. In November 1498
Venice had decided to send Andrea Zanchani to Istanbul with the tribute
which she owed for the island of Zante and with the assurance that she
had no desire for war. Zanchani’s mission of March 1499 failed, however,
to avert the approaching conflict. The sultan was apprehensive about the
alliance which Venice had just made with Louis XII of France against
Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan (ch. xn). Sforza had sent emissaries to
Istanbul with the information that France, if the invasion of Milan were
successful, intended to prepare a crusade against the Ottoman empire,
an argument which other Italian states hostile to Venice also urged on
the sultan. Bayezid, believing that the Venetians would be gravely hindered
by their Italian commitments, began the war in the summer of 1499.

On 12 August the Venetian fleet was defeated off the island of Sapienza,
not far from Modon, when attempting to prevent the Ottomans from
sailing to Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth. Although reinforced by a
French squadron, the Venetians fared no better in further minor engage-
ments off Belvedere and Chiarenza (23-5 August) and withdrew to
shelter under the guns of Zante, leaving the mouth of the gulf unguarded.
Lepanto, besieged by the sultan on land and now deprived of all relief
from the sea, surrendered on 29 August. Meanwhile, in order to divide
the Venetian forces, Mikhal-oghlii Iskender Pasha led the frontier warriors
of Bosnia on a great raid into the Friuli. In June he laid waste the lands
between Trieste and Laibach and then, reinforced after the fall of Lepanto,
crossed the Isonzo and the Tagliamento in the last days of September and
ravaged the Venetian lands as far as Vicenza.

In 1500 the Venetian fleet, ill-manned and ill-equipped owing to the
financial difficulties of the signoria, failed once more to defeat the Ottoman
naval forces operating off the coast of the Morea, where the great fortress
of Modon, invested by land and sea, fell to the sultan on 9 August. Six
days later Coron and Navarino surrendered to the Ottomans. Throughout
this campaign the frontier warriors raided the Venetian territories in
Albania and Dalmatia. Venice, desperate for allies, sought to win the
aid of the Hungarians through the offer of large subsidies and at length
succeeded in bringing them into the war, although a formal alliance,
which also included Pope Alexander VI, was not completed until May 1501.
In the meantime the Venetian fleet, with the help of a Spanish squadron
which carried a force of veteran soldiers under the command of the
famous Gonzalo de Cordoba, seized the island of Cephalonia in
December 1500. The league between Venice and Hungary failed to check
the Ottoman raids along the Adriatic shore, where, in the summer of 1501,

403

THE RENAISSANCE

Mehemmed Beg, the governor of Elbasan, took Durazzo. In October of
the same year Venetian and French ships sailed to the Aegean and made
an unsuccessful attack on the island of Lesbos. This, however, was almost
the last notable event of the war; for Venice found the conflict too
expensive and was longing for peace, a desire which the sultan was the
more inclined to welcome since affairs in Anatolia were beginning to
demand his close attention. None the less, desultory warfare continued
for most of 1502. Venice won a last victory when she captured the island
of Santa Maura on 30 August; while the Hungarians, whose share in
the war had been limited to ineffectual raids into Serbia and Bosnia,
made an incursion into the Ottoman provinces of Vidin and Nicopolis.

Peace was now in sight. The main articles were approved on
14 December 1502, although the formal ratifications were not completed
until August 1503. Venice abandoned all claim to Lepanto, Modon,
Coron, Navarino and Durazzo; agreed to continue the payment of
tribute for Zante; and promised to evacuate Santa Maura. In return,
she retained Cephalonia and recovered her commercial privileges in the
Ottoman empire. The delimitation of the frontiers on the Adriatic was
reserved for further discussion, as the result of which Venice yielded to
the sultan certain disputed lands near Cattaro in 1504, and, in 1506, the
fortress of Alessio in Albania. The war, if unspectacular, had been a great
triumph for Bayezld. On the Adriatic, and in the Morea where Venice
now held only Napoli di Romania and Monemvasia, he had brought the
consolidation begun by Mehemmed II much nearer to completion. Still
more notable, since it foreshadowed their future mastery of the Mediter-
ranean, is the fact that the Ottomans, aided by the Muslim corsairs, were
becoming a formidable Power at sea. The peace was not confined to
Venice alone. On 20 August 1503 the Hungarians obtained from the
sultan a truce for seven years which embraced the other Christian states
implicated directly or indirectly in the war. Bayezld was eager to be free
of all complications in Europe, since he had to deal with threatening
events in the east.

During the years of the Ottoman war with Venice a new power had
arisen in Persia. Shaikh Safi ad-DIn (1252-1334), who claimed descent
from ‘All, the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, had founded a
religious order, known after him as the Safawiyya, at Ardabil in Azerbaijan.
This mountainous region had long been a refuge for followers of the
Shi‘a, i.e. of various sects which all claim the caliphate for one or the
other amongst the descendants of ‘All. The Safawiyya, led by the family
of its founder, had developed, from the time of Shaikh Khoja ‘All (1392-
1429), a widespread religious propaganda with the result that Ardabil
became a much frequented centre of pilgrimage. Shaikh Junaid (1447-60),
ambitious to add political power to his religious authority, forged out of
the Safawiyya a military instrument which earned for him the enmity of

404

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

neighbouring princes, so that he had to flee to Anatolia. In the years
1449-56 he taught and preached with great success in Karaman and in
the province of Tekke around Antalia, in the Jebel Arsus in northern
Syria among the Varsak and Torghud Turcomans of Cilicia and the
Taurus, and in Janik and Kastamuni, a mountainous area in northern
Anatolia. From 1456-9 he disseminated his propaganda intensively from
Diyarbekir where he found shelter with the ruler of the Ak Koyunlii,
Uzun Hasan (p. 396), whose sister he married in 1458. The son of this
marriage, Shaikh Haidar, later received the hand of Uzun Hasan’s
daughter, ‘Alemshah Begum, who became the mother of Isma‘11, the
future shah of Persia. Events continued to favour the rising power of the
Safawiyya, for after the death of Ya‘kub Beg (1478-90), the son and
successor of Uzun Hasan, dynastic quarrels brought about the rapid
collapse of the Ak Koyunlii regime. There was now in western Persia
and Azerbaijan a political vacuum which the Safawiyya alone was strong
enough to fill. In 1499 Isma‘11, by this time the head of the order, set out
on a war of conquest which, through his victories at Shurur (1501) and
Hamadan (1503) over the divided princes of the Ak Koyunlii, made him
the master of Persia.

The Safawid propaganda in Anatolia, pursued with unbroken vigour
after the death of Shaikh Junaid, had won a success so remarkable,
especially amongst the Turcomans, that it was the Anatolian followers
of the Safawiyya who formed the main military strength of the new state
in Persia. In this connection, the names given to some of the most power-
ful Turcoman tribes in the service of Shah Isma‘11 are illuminating, such
as the Rum-lii (i.e. men from the Amasia-Sivas region, which was called
Rum), the Karaman-lii, and the Tekke-lii.

The Ottomans, who were sternly orthodox Muslims, abhorred the
teaching of the Safawiyya as heretical. They rightly regarded the movement,
however, as far more than a religious danger : for them it was also a grave
political menace. Even in normal times, the authorities in the Anatolian
provinces had difficulty in restraining the Turcoman tribes who were
ever prone, as nomads always are, to bring trouble to the settled popu-
lations in the villages and towns. The tribes won over by the Safawid
propaganda had become the blind and fanatical servants of a foreign
master held by them to be endowed with divine attributes. There was a
real danger that the Safawiyya, if it were allowed a free hand to organise
the Turcomans, might undermine Ottoman rule over entire provinces in
Anatolia. Nor was this all. The Shl‘a beliefs were strong in those regions
where Mamluk and Ottoman pretensions were in conflict. How, then,
would the Mamluks react if the Ottomans sought to crush the Safawid
movement in the Taurus lands? Intervention of this kind would mean a
radical alteration in the balance of forces along the frontier and might
drive the Mamluks, despite their adherence to the orthodox faith, into

405

THE RENAISSANCE

an alliance with the Sh!‘a State in Persia. If this were to happen, the
Ottomans would be confronted with a major crisis.

Even before the peace with Venice, Bayezid had been alarmed at the
progress of the Safawiyya. In 1502 he ordered numerous followers of
the Shl‘a to be deported from Tekke to his recent conquests, Modon
and Coron, in the Morea and rejected a protest from Shah Isma ‘11 who
complained that his adherents in the Ottoman lands were being hindered
from going to Persia.

Once he had established his power in western Persia, the shah began
to intervene on the Taurus frontier. ‘Ala ad-Daula, prince of Albistan,
had given refuge to Murad, the Ak Koyunlii lord of Fars and Persian
Iraq, whom Isma ‘11 had routed near Hamadan in 1503. Moreover, he
had tried to seize the region of Diyarbekir, which Isma ‘11 claimed for
himself as the successor of the Ak Koyunlii, and had refused to bestow his
daughter in marriage on the shah. In 1507-8 Safawid forces defeated ‘Ala
ad-Daula, conquered Kharput and Diyarbekir, and occupied Kurdistan.
Isma ‘11 had been careful to assure the Mamluks and the Ottomans that he
had no hostile intentions towards them. None the less, both Bayezid and the
Mamluk sultan Kansuh al-Ghauri (1501-16) garrisoned their frontiers in
strength to restrain the shah and keep the border Turcomans under control.

The danger of a conflict with Persia receded in 1510, for Isma'il had to
turn his attention to the east where the Uzbeg Khan of Transoxania had
overrun the Persian province of Khorasan. This diversion brought little
relief to the Ottomans, since in the next year a great revolt broke out in
Tekke amongst the adherents of the Safawiyya. Their leader, a certain
Shah Kuli, who had long been active in Tekke, preached the end of
Ottoman domination, declaring that Isma'il was the incarnation of the
Godhead, and he himself the Mahdi or ‘rightly guided one’ who would
restore the rule of the true believers. In the spring of 1511 the rebels
defeated the beglerbeg of Anatolia near Afiun Karahisar, plundered
Kutahia, and then advanced towards Brusa. The Grand Vizier ‘All
Pasha, with an army which included 4000 janissaries, joined the forces
of Amasia commanded by Bayezld’s son, Ahmed, and drove Shah Kuli
towards Kaysari. Near this town, in June 151 1, a battle was fought in
which both ‘All Pasha and Shah Kuli were slain. The rebels, routed and
leaderless, fled to Isma‘ 11 , who had some of them put to death for excesses
committed during their escape to Tabriz. The shah sought in this manner
to disclaim responsibility for the revolt, since he could not afford to
provoke the Ottomans while the Uzbeg war was still in progress. Bayezid,
however, was not free to attack Persia, even had he wished to do so, for,
owing to the quarrel between his sons over the succession to the throne,
the Ottoman empire was on the verge of civil war.

Three sons of Bayezid were alive in 1511, each of whom, in accordance
with the Ottoman custom, had been given charge of a province in Anatolia.

406

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Korkud, theeldestson, had been appointed governor of Tekke. Alarmed at
the growing influence of his brothers and worsted in a dispute with the
Grand Vizier ‘All Pasha over certain lands in Tekke, he had sailed to
Egypt in 1509, hoping to find there support for his claim to the throne.
Although well received at Cairo, he was unsuccessful, for the Mamluk
sultan Kansuh al-Ghauri, being then at war with the Portuguese in the
Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, had no wish to offend Bayezid. Korkud,
therefore, had no choice but to seek reconciliation with his father
who in 1510 restored him once more to Tekke. Each of the princes
desired a province as near as possible to Istanbul, since, in the event of
a conflict for the throne, to arrive there first might mean the difference
between success and failure. In this respect, Korkud won the advantage
over his younger brothers when, in exchange for Tekke, he obtained
from Bayezid the province of Sarukhan, centred around Manisa, which
was much closer to Istanbul. Nevertheless, despite the fact that he had
been sultan for some days after the death of Mehemmed II in 1481 (p. 397),
he had little chance of succeeding Bayezid. Amongst the great officials
of state and the janissaries he had the reputation of being a scholar and
poet ill-fitted for the Ottoman throne, an impression which his undistin-
guished share in the quelling of Shah Kuli’s revolt did nothing to diminish.
In the events which now ensued Korkud had but a min or role.

The issue was, in fact, to be fought out between Ahmed, the governor
of Amasia, and the youngest of the three princes, Selim, who had charge
over the remote province of Trebizond. To all appearance it was Ahmed
who would, in due course, become sultan. Bayezid seemed to incline
towards him rather than towards Selim, a predilection shared by a
powerful group of high officials. Selim, however, had one great advantage
over Ahmed : because of his warlike and resolute character he was beloved
of the janissaries. In the end, it was their approval, even more than the
boldness of his own schemes, which brought him to the throne.

Selim had prepared with great foresight for the hour of crisis. In
Trebizond he had built up an armed force which he led on raids into
Safawid territory with such effect that the shah had complained to
Bayezid in 1505 and again in 1508. In spite of these protests, Selim
made further incursions in the region of Erzinjan, whereupon Isma‘il,
in 1510, threatened to retaliate but was placated when an envoy arrived
bearing gifts from Bayezid. Not content with securing troops well
trained in warfare and loyal to his person, Selim made good use of his
influence at court to arrange the appointment of Iskender Beg, reported
to have been his son-in-law, as commander of the Ottoman fleet; if the
course of events were to favour Selim, Iskender Beg might be able to
prevent Ahmed from crossing the straits to Istanbul. To create a further
obstacle for Ahmed, Selim had his own son, Sulaiman, made governor
of Boli, a province in north-west Anatolia controlling the communications

407

THE RENAISSANCE

between Amasia and the capital; but the plan failed, for Ahmed, seeing
the danger to himself, induced the sultan to revoke the appointment.
Selim now made the daring resolve to transfer his activities from Trebizond
to the Balkans. He prepared for this enterprise by requesting and
obtaining for his son, Sulaiman, the province of Kaffa in the Crimea, an
excellent point of departure for a campaign across the Danube, all the
more since he succeeded at the same time in winning the alliance of Mengli
Girai, the khan of the Krim Tatars, who promised to provide him with
horsemen.

The time for action had come. Without seeking Bayezid’s consent,
Selim sailed with his troops from Trebizond to Kaffa where he enrolled
more men and increased his fleet. He ignored his father’s command that
he should return to Trebizond, declaring that he had left it because of his
desire to make war on the Christians and, for this purpose, wished to
be given a province in Europe. The extent of his request is not clear. He
seems to have asked for Semendria, but Bosnia and Silistria are also
mentioned in some of the sources. When Bayezid rejected this demand,
Selim sent his ships to the Danube estuary and, with an army composed
largely of Tatar horsemen, crossed the river in March 1511.

At Adrianople, where the court was then in residence, the partisans of
Ahmed strove to impress on the sultan the gravity of Selim’s offence; but
Bayezid, loath to begin a war against his son and worried over the revolt
of Shah Kuli which had broken out in Anatolia, resolved in the end to
grant what Selim desired. In a formal agreement he conferred on Selim
the province of Semendria and promised furthermore that he would not
abdicate in favour of Ahmed. This concession of a great government on
the middle Danube to a prince reputed to be himself a warrior and an
avowed advocate of war against the Christians was in full accord with
the wishes of the border chieftains of Serbia and Bosnia, for exaihple the
Malkoch-oghlu, who were resentful of the peaceful attitude which Bayezid
had maintained towards the Christian states since 1503.

For the moment Selim was content with his success ; but while he was
moving towards Semendria, news arrived that Shah Kuli had defeated
the beglerbeg of Anatolia and that the Grand Vizier ‘All Pasha, who was
a staunch friend of Ahmed, had been ordered to lead a strong force of
janissaries and other troops against the rebels. Selim suspected, and with
good reason, that ‘All Pasha, if he were able to crush the revolt, would
use the powerful army under his command to secure the throne for Ahmed.
Even before attacking Shah Kuli, the grand vizier had tried to win over
to such an enterprise the forces which he himself had brought from Istanbul,
an attempt which had failed, however, before the determination of his
janissaries not to be dissuaded from their preference for Selim. In
the meantime, to forestall the danger which would arise when Ahmed
and ‘All Pasha had united their armies, Selim marched once more on

408

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Adrianople which yielded to him without resistance, for Bayezid, thinking
his son meant to dethrone him, had withdrawn in haste towards Istanbul.
When Selim continued his pursuit, the sultan, under the urgent pressure
of his advisers, made a stand at Tchorlu. Here, on 3 August 1511, the
janissaries of Bayezid, however strong their inclination towards Selim,
fought loyally for their lawful master and by their discipline proved more
than a match for the Tatar horsemen who swarmed around them. Selim,
completely defeated, had no choice but to flee to his ships on the shore of
the Black Sea and to sail back to Kafia. Some sources relate that he
had not intended to give battle to his father and that only the rumour of
Bayezid’s death had made him hasten towards Istanbul in order to secure
the throne. Whether he was the victim of a deception and believed this
rumour, or else started it himself from motives of policy is not clear; but
there can be no doubt that Ahmed’s followers were doing their utmost to
bring about his downfall. A Venetian observer wrote at this time that it
was the great dignitaries who ‘dominate and lord it over the land’ and
that few of them wanted Selim as their master, since he was a man who
would pursue his own road and not submit to their control. 1

Meanwhile, both Shah Kuli and ‘All Pasha had fallen in the battle
fought near Kaysari in June 1511. Ahmed, though deprived of his
surest advocate, could still count on the aid of numerous and powerful
friends at court. Moreover, the death of the grand vizier had left him in
command of the strong forces which had suppressed the rebellion in Ana-
tolia. He therefore led them towards the capital, hoping that he would be
able to cross the straits despite the possible resistance of the Ottoman
fleet now under Iskender Pasha. When, however, in September 1511, his
allies at court sought to bring him across the water to Istanbul, the
janissaries, more than ever ill-disposed towards him because of the
ineptitude which he had shown during the campaign against Shah Kuli,
rose in revolt and sacked their houses. The warning was unmistakeable :
the janissaries would not have Ahmed as sultan.

This event was decisive. Now that his partisans were silenced, Ahmed
had but one course left to him: to strengthen and extend his power in
Anatolia and prepare for armed resistance. He brought much of western
Anatolia under his own control and proceeded to take over Karaman as
well, and this without asking for his father’s consent. It was in fact an
open revolt made manifest when he defied the order of the sultan to
withdraw at once from Karaman to his own province of Amasia.

Angered by Ahmed’s behaviour, Bayezid agreed to restore Semendria
to Selim who, since his defeat at Tchorlu, had been gathering new forces

1 Marino Sanuto, Diarii (Venice, 1879-1903), xrv, 293 (Andrea Foscolo to Piero Foscolo,
Pera, 28 March 1512): ‘. . .loro son quelli che domina e signorizano el paexe’; also ibid.
mi, 515-16 (the same to the same, Pera, 21 July 1511): ’Pochi da conto voria veder dito
Selim signor, perch£ 6 di sua testa e faria quello li paresse; ma le persone di bassa man e
homeni armigeri tutti lo desiderano. .

409

THE RENAISSANCE

at Kaffa. For a time his alliance with the Krim Tatars had seemed to be
in danger as a result of the intrigues which Ahmed instigated at the court
of the khan but, in the end, Mengli Girai proved faithful to his word.
Tatar horsemen rode once more with Selim when he crossed the Danube
in the last days of January 1512. His cause was already won. Ahmed
was reported to be seeking an alliance with Shah Isma‘11. This alone, by
arousing the fear of a possible Safawid intervention, was enough to bring
Selim to the throne. It was evident that a campaign in force would have
to be made against Ahmed without delay. In March 1512 the janissaries
demanded that Selim be recalled to lead them. To acquiesce meant to
abdicate, but the old sultan was compelled to agree. At this moment,
Prince Korkud, the governor of Sarukhan, made his own bid for the
throne. He came to Istanbul and went to the barracks of the janissaries,
hoping to win their aid on the plea that he had once been their sultan.
They refused to help him. Meanwhile Selim was approaching with all
haste and on 19 April encamped outside the capital. One week later he
became sultan. Bayezid was allowed to retire to the town of his birth,
Demotika, but died on 26 May 1512 before he reached his destination.
Of him Machiavelli wrote that, benefiting by the great achievements of
Mehemmed II, he was able to maintain the empire by the arts of peace
rather than war; but that, if Selim had been a sultan like Bayezid, the
Ottoman State would have been ruined. 1

Selim could not feel secure as long as his brothers and their sons were
alive. To do away with them was, therefore, his first concern. The danger
was urgent, for news arrived that Ahmed’s son, ‘Ala ad-Din, had seized
Brusa. In the summer of 1512, while the fleet watched the shores of
Anatolia, lest one of the princes should seek refuge abroad as Jem had
done, Selim drove Ahmed’s forces from Brusa back to Amasia and thence
towards the Persian and Syrian frontiers. On his return to Brusa he
ordered the death of five nephews who lived there (November 1512).
Soon afterwards the same fate befell Korkud who was captured in Tekke
whither he had fled from Sarukhan in the hope of escaping across the
sea. Meanwhile Ahmed had recovered Amasia where he passed the
winter in preparing for a new advance against Selim. His cause, however,
was desperate, since Shah Isma‘11, still occupied by his war against the
Uzbegs (p. 406), could give him no effective aid. In the spring of 1513
Ahmed began his last effort to win the throne. Although he defeated the
vanguard of Selim’s forces at Ermeni Derbend, the end came on 24 April
when at Yenishehir not far from Brusa he risked all on a decisive battle.
His men broke and fled before the might of the janissaries and the wild

1 Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra. . . Tito Livio, Lib. 1, cap. 19: ‘Baiasit. . .potette godersi le
fatiche di Maumetto suo padre; il quale. . . gli lascid un regno fermo, e da poterlo con l’arte
della pace facilmente conservare. Ma se il figliuolo Sail, presente signore, fosse stato simile
ai padre, e non all’avolo, quel regno rovinava.’

410

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

assault of Selim’s Tatar horsemen. Ahmed was taken in the rout and
killed at once on the order of Selim.

Ahmed’s death did not diminish the tension between the Ottomans and
the Safawids. In 1512 Isma’il had commanded the governor of Erzinjan
to lead several thousands of the Anatolian followers of the Safawiyya
into Persia. This action had given rise to frontier hostilities in the course of
which the forces of Erzinjan had seized the town of Tokat. Now in 1513
the shah welcomed at Tabriz a son of Ahmed, Prince Murad, who had
escaped from the battle at Yenishehir. These events convinced Selim
that war against Isma’il was unavoidable. As a precaution lest revolt
should break out in his rear, while he himself marched against Persia,
he ordered punitive expeditions to be made throughout Anatolia, in
which 40,000 adherents of the Shi’a faith are said to have been slain or
imprisoned.

On 24 April 1514 Selim began the long march to Persia, advancing
through Yenishehir and Akshehir to Konia and then to Kaysari. Here
he asked for supplies of food and reinforcements of men from ‘Ala ad-
Daula, prince of Albistan, who returned an evasive answer and did
nothing to restrain his Turcomans from molesting the Ottoman columns.
From Kaysari the sultan moved to Sivas where he held a muster of his
entire army and left behind a strong force to garrison the frontier regions.
As he advanced through Erzinjan and Erzerum, he found the lands before
him ravaged of all fodder and provisions by the Persian commanders,
so that his men suffered severe privations which were only partially
alleviated through the arrival of stores transported by sea to Trebizond
and thence laboriously overland on camels. Despite the grumbling of
the janissaries, Selim pressed forward until at last the shah was constrained
to give battle in defence of Tabriz. The two armies met at Tchaldiran on
23 August 1514. On the Ottoman right were the Anatolian horsemen
under Sinan Pasha, the beglerbeg of Anatolia, and on the left the cavalry
of Rumeli commanded by their own beglerbeg, Hasan Pasha; while at
the extremity of each wing were the guns linked together by iron chains.
The janissaries, protected by the baggage and the camels, held the
centre, the sultan himself standing behind them with his viziers and his
household cavalry. The Ottomans, exhausted after their arduous march,
had to face what must have been a maximum concentration of the
Safawid forces. In the number of his horsemen the shah was probably
not inferior to Selim ; but he had no artillery and no infantry comparable
to the janissaries. Hoping to overrun the Ottoman guns and take the
janissaries in the rear, Isma’il attacked on the extreme left and right of
the battlefield. His cavalry broke through the sipahis of Rumeli, only to
be decimated by the fire-arms of the janissaries ; while the assault against
the horsemen of Anatolia was shattered because Sinan Pasha ordered his
forces to fall back behind the guns which thus obtained a clear field of fire.

41 1

THE RENAISSANCE

This crushing victory opened for Selim the road to Tabriz which he
entered on 5 September. He intended to winter in the neighbouring
region of Karabagh where ample fodder and supplies could be found ; but
the janissaries threatened to revolt and compelled him to withdraw,
through Kars and Erzerum, to winter quarters around Amasia and Ankara,
where the army was dispersed in November 1514. Tchaldiran did not
lead to the conquest of Persia but was none the less a decisive battle.
Never again, not even when Selim was involved in his perilous war with
Egypt, did Shah Isma ‘11 dare to attack the Ottomans.

Tchaldiran had made Selim the master of Erzinjan and Baiburd which
he now united with Janik, Trebizond and Karahisar to form, under the
command of Biyikli Mehemmed Pasha, a strong frontier province in
the north-east of the empire. To consolidate his hold on this region,
Selim, while still in winter quarters at Amasia, ordered Mehemmed
Pasha to besiege the great fortress of Kamakh not far from Erzinjan.
It did not fall, however, until May 1515, after the sultan himself had
arrived there to hasten the siege. The conquest of Kamakh meant that
the hour of reckoning had come for ‘Ala ad-Daula, whom Selim had not
forgiven for his hostile behaviour during the campaign of Tchaldiran.
Already in November 1514 Selim had appointed as governor of Kaysari
a nephew of ‘Ala ad-Daula, Shahsuwar-oghlu ‘All, and sent him to raid
into his uncle’s territories. In June 1515 Sinan Pasha, at the head of
10,000 janissaries, defeated and slew ‘Ala ad-Daula together with four
of his sons. The principality of Albistan was now conferred on Shahsuwar-
oghlii ‘All, who was to rule over it as an Ottoman vassal.

At the same time Selim was extending Ottoman control over Kurdistan
where the native feudal lords, jealous of their independence, resented
Shah Isma‘IFs attempt, since 1 508 (p. 406), to rule them through governors
chosen amongst his own Turcoman chieftains. After Tchaldiran, Diyar-
bekir had revolted of its own accord against the shah. Moreover, twenty-
five of the Kurdish begs had appealed for aid to Selim who had thereupon
sent a prominent Kurdish noble, Idris, later famous as an Ottoman
historian, to receive their homage and organise the resistance against
the Safawids. Idris and the Kurds, although not unsuccessful in the field,
were unable, without further assistance, to relieve Diyarbekir, which was
closely besieged by the main Safawid forces in Kurdistan. Once the
campaign against ‘Ala ad-Daula had ended, Biyikli Mehemmed Pasha,
then at Baiburd, was sent with several thousand men to join Idris and
raise the siege, a task which he achieved in October 1515. Nevertheless,
the Safawid commander in Kurdistan, Karakhan, continued to resist
stubbornly until at last he too was defeated in 1516 at Koch Hisar, after
Mehemmed Pasha and Idris had been reinforced by Khusrev Pasha,
the governor of Karaman. Urfa, Mardin, and Mosul now fell to the
Ottomans, so that almost all Kurdistan was in their hands. Idris, receiving

412

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

from Selim full authority to regulate the future status of the new conquests,
wisely refrained from any attempt to impose everywhere direct Ottoman
control. He divided the land into twenty-four governments, of which
five were to be completely autonomous under Kurdish chieftains, and
a further eight likewise under native families, but with the right of
supervision reserved to Ottoman officials ; the other eleven areas becoming
Ottoman provinces of the normal kind. This far-sighted policy secured
for the sultan the continued allegiance of the Kurds.

The events of 15 14-15 had altered profoundly, and to the detriment
of Egypt, the balance of forces along the Taurus frontier. The Mamluk
sultan Kansuh al-Ghauri had hoped in 1514 for an Ottoman defeat which
would enable him, at little cost to himself, to improve his position on
the Taurus. If he had not instigated ‘Ala ad-Daula’s hostile behaviour
towards the Ottomans, he had clearly approved of it; for when Selim,
while on the march to Persia, sent an ambassador in all haste to Cairo,
with the urgent request that Egypt should restrain ‘Ala ad-Daula,
Kansuh had given a polite but unsatisfactory answer. Later it emerged
that he had secretly congratulated the prince of Albistan, bestowing on
him a robe of honour and urging him to persevere in his unfriendly
attitude towards the Ottomans. Alarmed at the danger which threatened
‘Ala ad-Daula after Tchaldiran, Kansuh al-Ghauri complained to Selim
about the appointment of Shahsuwar-oghlii ‘Ali as governor of Kaysari,
alleging that this province was a part of Albistan and therefore within
the Mamluk sphere of influence. This protest, delivered to Selim in
April 1515, as he was marching to the siege of Kamakh, had no effect.
As we have seen, once Kamakh had fallen, ‘Ala ad-Daula was defeated
and slain in June of the same year. Kansuh al-Ghauri was now compelled
to take decisive action. When emissaries from the shah arrived in Cairo
to ask for Mamluk aid against a possible renewal of the Ottoman attack
on Persia, he promised, in such an event, to appear on the Syrian frontier
with all his forces.

The belief that a mere demonstration in force would set a limit to the
Ottoman advance and that no actual warfare would ensue was nothing
but wishful thinking. The Mamluks indeed must have been aware of their
own weakness compared with the Ottomans. The feuds of the great amirs
amongst themselves and with their sultan, feuds in which their respective
Mamluks were involved, were bound to have a disastrous effect in a time
of crisis. As soldiers, too, the Mamluks, now less well trained than of
old, had lost much of their former excellence. Moreover, their contempt
for the use of fire-arms and their blindness to the value of artillery, so
vividly shown at Tchaldiran, revealed them as a force which, in military
technique, had already become rather obsolete. Equally grave was the
fact that the populations of Egypt and Syria were wholly estranged from
the Mamluk regime, indeed even hostile to it — and with good reason.

29 413 NCMH X

THE RENAISSANCE

The contemporary historian, Ibn Iyas, emphasises time and again the
rapacity of the Mamluks. Exorbitant taxation and unbridled licence
amongst the soldiery had long been normal evils of their rule. Kansuh
al-Ghauri, having lost the large revenues of the Indian trade because of
the Portuguese blockade in the Red Sea, had to resort to harsh financial
measures, with the result, as Ibn Iyas wrote, that each day of his reign
seemed to the common people to be like a thousand years. 1 The Mamluks,
in their hour of need, could expect no aid from their subjects.

Although aware of Kansuh al-Ghauri’s intention to support the shah,
Selim was determined to resume the offensive against Persia, which he
regarded as the more dangerous foe. He therefore sent Sinan Pasha, now
grand vizier, to Kurdistan. Sinan set out on 28 April 1516 and, at
Kaysari on 13 June, joined forces with the beglerbeg of Rumeli and the
agha of the janissaries. He was compelled, however, to halt in Albistan
when, on 4 July, spies brought him the news that Kansuh was advancing
towards Aleppo and that the Mamluk governor of Malatia had been
instructed to deny the Ottomans passage through his province.

Already on 21 April Kansuh had issued orders for a campaign on the
Taurus frontier. From 9 May Mamluk detachments marched daily into
Syria, the sultan himself, with the main force, moving out of his camp
at Ridaniyya near Cairo on 24 May. He took with him almost all the
funds available in the state treasury and most of the valuable war material
gathered by his predecessors. Arriving at Gaza on 5 June and at Damascus
two weeks later, he reached Aleppo on 10 July. Here emissaries whom
Selim, still hoping that the Mamluk intervention might be averted or at
least deferred, had dispatched from Istanbul on 4 June, awaited him
with the assurance that their master had no wish for a conflict with
Egypt. Kansuh reproached them vehemently for the seizure of Albistan
and threw them into prison.

Meanwhile, Selim had crossed from Istanbul to Scutari on 5 June.
Marching through Kutahia (20 June) and thence through Afiun Karahisar
and Akshehir to Konia (1 July) and Kaysari, he joined Sinan Pasha with
strong reinforcements on 23 July. At this moment, an ambassador sent
by Kansuh al-Ghauri from Aleppo arrived, warning Selim not to proceed
against Persia and, as one Ottoman source relates, requesting that
Albistan be restored to Egypt. Selim’s answer was brief: insistence on
these demands would leave him no choice but to invade Syria.

This unexpected defiance must have brought sudden disillusionment
to Kansuh al-Ghauri. In a last effort to avoid war, he ordered the Otto-
man emissaries imprisoned at Aleppo to be set free and sent one of his
amirs, Mughul Bay, to Selim. It was already too late. On 28 July Selim
had entered the plain of Malatia where he was well placed to move

1 Ibn IySs, The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt, transl. W. H. Salmon (Oriental Translation
Fund, New Series, vol. xxv), London (1921), p. 58.

414

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

towards either Aleppo or Diyarbekir, as need should arise. Here he was
joined by the troops of Kurdistan led by Biyikli Mehemmed Pasha.
When, on 3 August, it became known that Kansuh al-Ghauri had asked
the shah for aid, Selim was forced to make an immediate decision.
On 4 August, in consultation with his viziers, he resolved to leave Persia
alone and to turn at once against Syria. Some days later he must have
received in audience the Mamluk envoy Mughul Bay. In his anger that
Kansuh had chosen a soldier as ambassador, Selim had the amir’s retinue
slain and sent the amir himself ignominiously back to Aleppo. Advancing
from the north-east the Ottomans reached ‘Aintab on 20 August, the
day after the Mamluks had marched out to meet them, leaving most of
their baggage and treasure in the citadel of Aleppo, since it was evident
that the decisive battle would be fought somewhere near the city. The
two armies met at Marj Dabik on 24 August 1516.

There is no good evidence for the total strength of the Ottoman forces,
but their battle order is clear: in the centre stood Selim with the grand
vizier and the janissaries; on his right were the Anatolian cavalry and,
beyond them, Turcomans from Albistan and Cilicia commanded by
Shahsuwar-oghlii ‘All and by Mahmud Beg, a prince of the Ramazan-
oghlu; on his left, the horsemen of Rumeli and then the Kurds under
Biyikli Mehemmed. To oppose the Ottomans, Kansuh al-Ghauri had
perhaps 60,000 men, of whom 12,000 to 15,000 were Mamluks. The
rest were contingents from Egypt and Syria composed in part of
Bedouin, Turcoman, and Kurdish horsemen. The Mamluk order of
battle is not known in detail, but the sultan himself held the centre,
the troops of Aleppo being on his right, and those of Damascus on his
left wing.

Even now, Kansuh al-Ghauri could not refrain from acting as a partisan
in the feuds which divided his forces. Wishing to spare his personal
Mamluks, he ordered those who had belonged to his predecessors to
make the first assault. These veterans, about 2000 in number, followed
by the horsemen of Aleppo and Damascus, drove back the Kurds and
the Turcomans on the extreme left and right of the Ottoman formation,
only to be cut down by the fire of the enemy guns and of the janissaries.
At this critical moment when a resolute advance might yet have won success,
Kansuh al-Ghauri and his own Mamluks remained inactive. As the
Ottomans launched a violent attack on the Mamluk centre, Kha’ir Beg,
the governor of Aleppo, who had long been in traitorous communication
with Selim, spread the rumour that Kansuh was slain. The Mamluks
wavered and, after a brief resistance, fled. In the turmoil Kansuh al-
Ghauri met his death. At Aleppo, where in the weeks before the battle
their excesses had aroused bitter resentment, the fleeing Mamluks found
the gates closed against them, a disaster which meant the loss of the state
treasury and all the war material lodged in the citadel. Syria could no

415 *9-3

THE RENAISSANCE

longer be defended. Nothing was left to them save to continue their
flight first to Damascus and then to Egypt.

Syria yielded to the Ottomans without further resistance. Selim entered
Aleppo on 28 August. One month later he reached Damascus where he
decided to rest his tired army. Ottoman governors were now appointed
to each of the more important cities like Aleppo, Tripoli, Damascus, and
Jerusalem; while a strong garrison was stationed at Gaza to watch the
route into Egypt across the Sinai desert. As yet Selim was uncertain
about the wisdom of continuing the war. His main purpose had been
achieved. No more need he fear an alliance between Egypt and Persia,
now widely separated by a Syria firmly held in Ottoman hands. It was
true that he could count on enough time to invade Egypt, for Shah
Isma’il would not attack during the harsh Anatolian winter but wait at
least until the spring of 1517. Nevertheless, an assault on Egypt would
be a dangerous enterprise. There was first the desert to be crossed where
water would be scarce and the Arab tribes eager to harass the Ottomans;
and then, no doubt, the Mamluks would resist desperately in defence of
their last stronghold. After much thought and despite Kha’ir Beg’s plea
for continued war, Selim sent an ambassador to Cairo, offering peace if
the new Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay, who had been raised to the throne
on 16 October, would consent to govern Egypt as an Ottoman vassal.

Before the result of this mission could be known, it was learnt that
Tuman Bay, though hard pressed by the discontent of the Mamluks and
by lack of funds and equipment, had dispatched about 10,000 men
under the amir Janberdi al-Ghazali to reconquer Gaza. To meet this
threat, the Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha marched from Damascus on
1 December with 5000 men, including a contingent of janissaries, and
joined the garrison of Gaza just as the Mamluks were emerging from the
Sinai desert. Feigning a retreat, he moved northward by night, turned
swiftly to the south, and forced Janberdi to stand and fight on 2 1 December.
The fire of the janissaries drove the Mamluks from their strong position
on the edge of a steep wadi. Sinan Pasha crossed, re-formed his men, and
launched a fierce assault which ended in the rout of the Mamluks.

Meanwhile, Selim, with all his forces save for the garrisons left in
Syria, had moved southward from Damascus on 14 December. The
Mamluk attempt to recover Gaza and the news, received towards the
end of the month, that his ambassador to Cairo had been slain convinced
him that Egypt would have to be conquered. He joined Sinan Pasha at
Gaza on 3 January 1517 and six days later began the march through the
desert. Although repeatedly harassed by the Arab tribes whom Tuman
Bay had roused against them, the Ottomans were on Egyptian soil by
17 January and, after a further march of two days, reached Belbeis about
thirty miles to the north-east of Cairo. Through the treachery of the
Mamluk amir Janberdi al-Ghazali it was discovered that Tuman Bay had

416

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

constructed at Ridaniyya a fortified emplacement defended by ditches
and by all the guns which he could muster. On 23 January Selim took
these defences in the rear and destroyed them by artillery fire. None the
less, the battle was not won until the repulse of a desperate Mamluk
assault, during which the Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha was killed. Four
days of stubborn street fighting ensued in Cairo (27-30 January), before
the Mamluk resistance was broken. On the night of the 27th Tuman Bay,
with about 7000 men, surprised and overcame the Ottoman detachments
stationed in Cairo after the battle of Ridaniyya ; but defeat was inevitable
when, in the following night, Selim brought his artillery into the city in order
to batter down the Mamluk barricades. After a last stand near the citadel,
Tuman Bay escaped with a mere remnant of his forces. With some aid
from the Arab tribes he continued to harass the Ottomans until at last
he was beaten once more on the banks of the Nile in March 1517. Soon
afterwards he fell into Ottoman hands and on 13 April was executed in
Cairo.

The conquest of Syria and Egypt meant a great increase in the prestige
of the Ottomans, already renowned as the foremost warriors of Islam in
war against the Christians. Now for the first time an Ottoman sultan was
honoured as the Servitor of the two Sacred Cities, Mecca and Medina, a
title which made him pre-eminent amongst the rulers of the Muslim
world. In Egypt, Selim contented himself with leaving an Ottoman pasha
and a strong garrison at the head of affairs, the old Mamluk order with
its own laws and its own system of military fiefs and administration being
allowed to continue; whereas in Syria he created provinces organised on
the lines found elsewhere in the empire, although here, too, Mamluk
laws and local customs were confirmed to a large degree. At the same
time he recognised the privileges of the Arab chieftains, of the Druze
and Christian lords of the Lebanon, and of the Turcoman dynasties on
the Taurus frontier, for example the Ramazan-oghlii. Nevertheless,
despite these arrangements, there was unrest for some years in the
former Mamluk dominions, until in the reign of Selim’s son, Sulaiman,
the Ottoman regime was reorganised in a more stable and permanent
manner.

On 10 September 1517, having appointed the former Mamluk amir
Kha’ir Beg as pasha of Egypt because of his intimate acquaintance with
conditions there, Selim began the long march from Cairo back to Anatolia.
By 7 October he was outside Damascus, where he spent the winter in
making further arrangements for the administration of Syria and in
dealing with the revolt of an Arab chieftain, a certain Ibn Hanush. While
Selim was still at Damascus, he received an ambassador from Persia, who
had come to compliment him on the conquest of the Mamluk realm.
Throughout the Ottoman campaign Shah Isma‘11 had remained quiet,
in part because he feared to risk another defeat, but also because troubles

417

THE RENAISSANCE

in eastern Persia had claimed his attention. His dispatch of an ambassador
to Syria implied that he had no wish for further hostilities with the
Ottomans. Nevertheless, around Tokat in Anatolia, adherents of the
Shf a, led by a certain Shah Well, had started a new rebellion which was
crushed in 1518 by Shahsuwar-oghlii ‘All, the Ottoman vassal prince of
Albistan. In the meantime, Selim, having entrusted Damascus to the
former Mamluk Janberdi al-Ghazali, had arrived at Aleppo in March
1518. Here he received the news that the new pasha of Damascus had
defeated and killed the Arab chieftain Ibn Hanush. After remaining in
Aleppo for two months the sultan resumed the march towards Istanbul
which he reached on 25 July, just over two years since he had left it in
1516.

With the Christians there had been peace since 1503. Venice, in 1513,
had obtained the renewal of her commercial privileges in the Ottoman
empire. After the conquest of Syria and Egypt she sought from Selim
a confirmation of the rights which she had secured in those countries
under the Mamluk sultans. This was achieved in the agreement of
17 September 1517, Venice promising to pay to the Ottomans the annual
tribute of 8000 ducats which she had given to the Mamluks for the
possession of Cyprus. The Hungarians and the Poles were also able to
remain at peace with the sultan despite the ceaseless unrest along the
frontiers. In 1519 Selim renewed with them the truce which had been
extended on several occasions since 1503. This maintenance of peace in
the west cannot be taken to mean that Selim had no aggressive intentions
for the future. In 1515 he had begun the creation of a great arsenal at
Istanbul. Now, in the years 1518-20, he pressed forward with the building
of a new and more powerful fleet. It seems that he had in mind an
attack on Rhodes which Mehemmed II had failed to take in 1480; but
before he could set out on such an enterprise, he died on 20 September 1520
near Tchorlu while travelling from Istanbul to Adrianople.

Even in his own time his character gave rise to widely differing judgments.
To the superficial observer he was, by reason of his severity, little more
than a tyrant. Yet, with all his warlike ardour and fierce anger which
earned for him the name, compounded both of fear and admiration, of
Yavuz Sultan Selim, i.e. the Grim Sultan, he was also a patron of learning
and literature, him self writing poetry in Persian. The Venetian Luigi
Mocenigo who saw him victorious in Cairo at the summit of his fame and
splendour retained an abiding impression of his greatness. 1 In five years
of relentless warfare Selim had solved the grave problems which his father
had bequeathed to him. Now he handed to his own son Sulaiman an

1 Paolo Giovio, Commentario de le cose de Turchi (Venice, 1541), fol. 25v-26r: \ . .mi
diceva il clarissimo Miser Luigi Mocenigo. . .che essendo lui al Cairo Ambasciadore,
appresso a Soltan Selim, et havendo molto ben pratticato, che nullo huomo era par ad esso
in virtii, iustitia humanity, et grandezza d’animo, et che non haveva punto del Barbaro. . ..’

418

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

empire vastly increased in size, enriched with new resources, and able to
resume the offensive against the Christians on a scale more formidable
than ever before. The Ottoman poet and historian Kemalpashazade,
Selim’s companion on the Egyptian campaign, wrote, with no exaggeration,
in a lament on the death of the great sultan, that in a brief space of time
he had achieved much and, like the setting sun, had cast a long shadow
over the face of the earth . 1

1 See E. J. W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, vol. in (ed. E. G. Browne, London,

1904), p. 19.

419

CHAPTER XV

THE NEW WORLD

I. THE PORTUGUESE EXPANSION

H istorians have chosen the discovery of America as a convenient
date for dividing modem times from the Middle Ages, a conven-
tional point for changing editors and attitudes. Yet the history of
science, the history of ideas, and perhaps especially the history of the
expansion of Europe all serve to remind us that the division is an arbitrary
one. The world of Ptolemy did not suddenly become the world of
Mercator. On the contrary, a traditional cosmography was gradually
adjusted in the light of widening experience, and even Columbus’s remark-
able discovery forms part of a long process that has its origins deeply
hidden in the Middle Ages. Behind his venture across the Atlantic lies
the whole range of the Portuguese discoveries of the fifteenth century
leading up to the finding of the sea-route to India. At their head
stands the conquest of Ceuta in 1415, when the Portuguese established
their first overseas possession and thus launched the movement of
European expansion. This expansion in turn is the inversion of the
Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula. The main phases of peninsular
medieval history thus provide the background of the discoveries — the
collapse of the ‘Ummaiyad caliphate after 1002, which opened the centre
of the peninsula immediately and the south ultimately to the Christian
advance; the conquest of Lisbon in 1 147, the first Atlantic seaport where
the Gothic north met the Mozarabic south; the capture of Seville and
the opening of the straits of Gibraltar to the trade of northern and
southern Europe; the intervention of the peninsular states in the affairs
of Muslim North Africa; the expansion of Italian commerce from the
Mediterranean into the Atlantic, and the confluence of Italian and
northern European enterprise and capital in Portugal.

The medieval economic history of Portugal is still imperfectly known,
yet it is abundantly clear that the undertakings of the Infante Henry
cannot be viewed independently of that commercial and maritime ex-
perience in the winning of which he displayed so fruitful an interest.
Between the capture of Ceuta in 1415 and the death of the infante in 1460,
the Portuguese had acquired a certain leadership in nautical science, in
naval construction and in the methods of exploration and colonisation.
They had settled and brought under cultivation the uninhabited Azores
and Madeira groups, hitherto only casually visited by Europeans. They
had edged their way in the newly-invented caravel down the west African
coast to within eight degrees of the Equator, or possibly somewhat beyond,

420

THE NEW WORLD

and they had engaged in trade with successive races of natives, Berbers,
Azenegues, Jaloffs and Mandingas. In these activities they were followed
by the seamen of the Andalusian fishing-ports to the west of Seville, who
occupied the Canaries.

The transformation of the Reconquest into a movement of expansion
in Africa may have been in the minds of statesmen in the twelfth century.
Even before taking Seville, Ferdinand III intervened in Morocco, and by
1280 Tunisia was a Catalan protectorate. Soon after, Castile and Aragon
defined their zones of influence by treaty. A limited European expansion
in Africa dates thus at least from the thirteenth century. At what
precise moment the infante of Portugal and his collaborators raised
the sights to a wider and more significant expansion, it is difficult to
say. The occupation of the Azores and the Madeiras in the first half of
the fifteenth century is plainly something outside the scope of the limited
expansion of the Reconquest (though the methods by which they were
colonised were those that had been learnt during the resettlement of the
peninsula); so too were Henry’s schemes for reaching the mysterious
Christian ruler Prester John, at first thought to be in Asia, but later
identified with the ruler of Abyssinia. In Henry’s time the remote fable
of Prester John and the marvellous tale of Marco Polo were brought into
perspective, and from their fusion emerged the idea, which was to become
an aim of Portuguese national policy, of finding a sea-way to the East.
It would, of course, be wrong to ignore the complexity of Henry’s motives.
The possibility of leading a new crusade against Islam, the hope of finding
a Christian ally in Africa, the quest for geographical knowledge, the
desire to capture the spice trade, the aspiration to spread the gospel —
all these purposes were present, and in differing proportions at different
times. Occasionally the desire to crusade outweighed all other considera-
tions, and the conduct of a religious war in Morocco was placed before the
pursuit of the discoveries. Owing to the limited resources at the disposal
of the Portuguese kings, any major campaign in Morocco for long re-
quired at least a temporary interruption of the sea-voyages, and this and
the weakness of the kings who preferred to seek expansion in Morocco,
Afonso V and the unhappy Sebastian, with whom the dynasty of Avis
foundered in the wreckage of the Moroccan policy, have tended to
obscure the fact that the existence of a strong sea-power in north-
west Africa could well have thwarted the whole scheme of the dis-
coveries, and that the subjugation of the Moroccan seaports was there-
fore almost essential to its success. In the last quarter of the fifteenth
century the finding of a sea route to India clearly emerged as the main
objective of Portuguese overseas policy: it remained so until the cata-
strophic knight-errantry of Sebastian changed the whole course of
Portuguese history.

It is hard to fix the start of this preoccupation with the Orient. We

421

THE RENAISSANCE

know that Henry’s brother, the future regent Dom Pedro, spent four
years in foreign travel between 1425 and 1429, that he fought against the
Turks, and that in Venice the doge presented him with a copy of Marco
Polo and an unidentified mappa mundi. These gifts were of more than
symbolical importance. The growing European demand for spices and
the high duties levied by Egypt on the transit of oriental goods naturally
placed a new value on the discovery of a direct route to the East, but we
have no precise information of the channels by which such economic forces
came to bear on the Portuguese movement of discovery.

Already the legend of Prester John had been cut down to size. In the
fourteenth century, European travellers had reached Abyssinia, and in
the fifteenth several Abyssinian missions came to Europe— one was in
Lisbon in 1452. Ten years earlier the infante had instructed one of his
followers to sail to Africa in search of news of the land of Prester John
and of India. Successive captains pressed down to the Guinea coast
vainly seeking tributaries of the Nile and even that ‘terrestial paradise’
which Columbus half a century later thought to lie at the source of the
Orinoco. The diligent inquiries that Cadamosto made among West
African natives about their religion and their neighbours were evidently
framed in the hope that they would have news of a Christian ruler, yet
none was forthcoming. When the infante died in 1460, his expeditions
had still reached only as far south as Sierra Leone. His nephew, the
Infante Dom Fernando, completed the exploration of the Cape Verde
Islands, but died in 1470. The king, Afonso V, inclined towards knightly
deeds against the infidels of Morocco and displayed little interest in the
long series of voyages which seemed only to lead to endless dickering
with African savages. Yet the discoveries were not entirely neglected.
An effective temporary expedient was put into practice. The trade of
West Africa was leased by the Crown to a wealthy Lisbon merchant,
Fem&o Gomes, who undertook in return to explore a hundred leagues
of coast a year for five years, beginning from Sierra Leone. It was
naturally hoped that India would be found to lie within this range, and
such expectations were supported by the statements of the geographers
Ptolemy and Fra Mauro. No chronicles exist of the voyages carried
out under this contract, but Femao Gomes’s captains entered the Gulf of
Guinea, passed Nigeria and reached the Cameroons. However, when
the contract expired in 1474, it was not renewed, and the conduct of the
discoveries was taken over by Afonso’s energetic and capable son, the
future John II, who succeeded to the throne in 1481. The resumption of
royal control was marked by new and stringent laws to protect the Crown’s
rights. Ruthless measures were taken against intruders in the African
trade; the fort at Arguim was strengthened and a new one built at Mina.
The establishment of this station was at once followed by the two voyages
of Diogo Cao begun in 1482, when he reached the Congo and explored

422

THE NEW WORLD

part of the coast of what is now Angola, and concluded in i486 or 1487,
by which time he had reached Cape Cross in south-west Africa. These
voyages took the Portuguese much farther south than they imagined
would be necessary before turning north-east again for Prester John and
the Indies. In view of the great distances involved John II both considered
alternative means for reaching India and sought to verify the exact
whereabouts of Abyssinia and India by sending expeditions overland.
He seems to have consulted an Italian geographer, Paolo Toscanelli, about
the problem of reaching India by sailing to the west. The only evidence
for this, it is true, is the letter that Toscanelli later sent in reply to
Columbus’s inquiry, but there is no good reason to repudiate it. It is
generally assumed that John rejected Toscanelli’s advice. What seems
more probable is that John did in fact send or license expeditions to the
west, but that ships either were lost or returned without reaching land.
In any case, when, probably in 1484, Columbus put his scheme before
John, the Portuguese council rejected it, either because they lacked
confidence in Columbus himself, or because they had now evidence that
the true route to India was by way of Africa.

In i486 the Portuguese received promising news from a native of Benin,
who reported the existence of a great king called Ogane. This ruler
confirmed the authority of the chiefs of Benin and sent them a cross to
wear. He was never seen, but ambassadors kissed his foot which he put
out from under a curtain. He lived twenty moons east of Benin. Ogane
seemed undoubtedly to be Prester John, and the twenty moons were
Fra Mauro’s 300 leagues. This news seems to have decided John to
test the information he had by sending single explorers overland to
Abyssinia and India. One of these, Pero da Covilha, a member of John’s
bodyguard who had served as a spy in Spain and Morocco, successfully
reached Cananor, Calicut and Goa, returning to Cairo after about four
years, where he met other emissaries of John II to whom he made his
report. His companion Afonso de Paiva, commissioned for Abyssinia,
died on the way, and Covilha was therefore instructed to proceed from
Cairo thither. He successfully made the journey, settled in Abyssinia,
and there spent the rest of his life, being visited some thirty years later
by members of Dom Rodrigo de Lima’s expedition. Although opinions
differ about whether Covilha’s news of India reached John II before
Vasco da Gama set out, it seems quite probable that it did.

Meanwhile Bartolomeu Dias had been sent out to carry on the great
quest by sea. His three ships left Lisbon in August 1487, carrying a number
of negroes who were to go inland with samples of spices and precious
metals and ask the way to Prester John and India. After coasting as far
as Angra Pequena, he was at length driven out to sea by storms, and only
after these had subsided did he turn east and, failing to find land, ran
north to discover what he called the Bahia dos Vaqueiros. This was the first

423

THE RENAISSANCE

time a European ship had entered eastern waters. Although Dias advanced
a little farther and would himself have gone on, his men grew restive and
in view of their lack of supplies insisted on returning, passing on the way
the Cape of Good Hope which they had previously missed. Dias’s return
to Lisbon took place at the end of 1488. The news that he had successfully
rounded the African continent and laid open the way to India caused
John II to order the preparation of a suitable expedition to crown the
great enterprise.

For reasons that are not altogether clear, a long delay occurred before
this fleet could sail. It is probable that, at the same time as Dias sailed
to reach India by the Cape, another Portuguese expedition led by Francisco
Dulmo attempted to find the sea route to India by crossing the Atlantic,
but that the attempt failed. At about the same time Columbus despaired
of persuading John to provide the facilities he sought and retired to
Castile to ply Isabella and Ferdinand with his theories. Although timber
had been cut for the Indian fleet and an admiral appointed to take charge
of it, the expedition was still not ready when at the beginning of March 1493
Columbus suddenly appeared off Lisbon after having completed his
extraordinary feat. Although John received Columbus courteously, he
does not seem to have been able to conceal his mortification at having,
as it was supposed, failed to be the first to reach India; and while he gave
the discoverer facilities to clean and refit the Nina, he had already deter-
mined to resist the claims of Ferdinand and Isabella by alleging the
Treaty of Alcagovas and the bull Aeterni regis of 1481, which assigned
all discoveries south of the Canaries and west of Africa to Portugal.

Columbus’s voyage was therefore followed by protracted negotiations
between Portugal and Spain. The Spaniards began by obtaining papal sup-
port for their case with the bull Inter caetera of 3 May 1493, the Portuguese
by giving orders for the preparation of a fleet which was to sail across
the Atlantic under the command of Dom Francisco de Almeida. Only
in June 1494 was the state of suspense ended by the conclusion of the
Treaty of Tordesillas, which established the famous line of demarcation
running north and south three hundred and seventy leagues west of the
Cape Verdes. This arrangement reserved for Portugal the discovery of
Brazil, whose existence is said to have been suspected by John II, while
it allowed Castilian ships to run across the Atlantic secure from the
stronger Portuguese fleet. The negotiations were conducted on the eve of
Columbus’s second voyage when the discoverer was preparing a grand
fleet with which he hoped suitably to impress the rulers of Japan, China
and India. John II, who had made a better bargain than he knew,
died just over a year later in October 1495. If Columbus had succeeded
in reaching India on his second voyage, the long-cherished aim of the
Portuguese discoveries would have had to be relinquished, for the
Castilians could have barred them from the Orient just as they barred

424

THE NEW WORLD

the Castilians from Africa. But Columbus’s second voyage brought
no real evidence that he had reached or was approaching the Indies,
and, by the time he returned in the middle of 1496, his undertaking was
bathed in disillusionment. He himself continued to affirm that the lands
he had discovered were a little way from Asia, but there were now few
who shared his belief.

It was in these circumstances that the new ruler of Portugal, Dom
Manuel, put the question of the continuation of the discoveries before his
council in the first year of his reign, in December 1496. Some of the mem-
bers, aware of the cost of the Moroccan campaigns and the need for some
conservation of forces in face of the greatly strengthened power of Castile,
now united with Aragon and, doubtless disquieted by the supposed
Castilian discovery of the outer isles of Asia, were inclined to abandon
the great enterprise, but others were in favour of pursuing it, and Dom
Manuel was with them. A new expedition would sail for India by the
traditional route as soon as possible. The admiral appointed by John II
had died, and his son Vasco da Gama, whose leadership, firmness and
courage were unquestioned, was given the command. Vasco da Gama’s
four ships left Lisbon in July 1497; after three months at sea without
sight of land, they touched shore not far from the Cape of Good Hope,
and early in 1498 made contact with the outposts of Muslim civilisation
in East Africa at Mozambique, where a pilot was obtained. They called
at Mombasa, and at Malindi, where Gama was hospitably received and
met Indian seafarers whom he thought were Christians. The fleet left
Malindi on 24 April, sighted India on 15 May and sailed into a harbour
near Calicut two days later.

In reply to Gama’s announcement of his arrival the samorin of Calicut
sent a welcome, and Gama went ashore with thirteen companions to
present King Manuel’s letter. He was taken into what he supposed was a
church, prayed before a goddess he thought was the Virgin Mary, and
was attended in the streets by an enormous throng with drums, trumpets
and volleys of shot. Having pushed his way through to the palace, Gama
was taken before the samorin and explained the long story of the Portu-
guese quest, offering Dom Manuel’s friendship. Unfortunately the
presents he had for disposal, consisting of cloth, coral, sugar and honey,
were considered quite unsuitable for the samorin. Gama thus lost some
face, but was permitted to trade.

At this moment the states of the Malabar Coast were governed by
several Hindu princes of whom the chief was the samorin of Calicut.
Their foreign trade was conducted by Arabs or by native Muslims.
These merchants, seeing in the Portuguese undeniable rivals in the Indian
trade, set out to make things difficult for them. A large bill for customs
duties was presented to the Portuguese, and their goods seized, together
with some men. These men were duly recovered, but Gama decided to

425

THE RENAISSANCE

depart, receiving a final letter from the samorin expressing interest in
further trade. At length on io July 1499, after an absence of two years,
the first of Gama’s ships reached Lisbon again. Gama himself was given
a triumphal reception. He had crowned a century of effort, and brought
back samples of most of the Indian wares that had become the chief
incentive of the great movement of expansion. Unlike Columbus, who
had demonstrated his theories to his own satisfaction, but failed to satisfy
his employers’ more material interests, Gama had proved the rightness
of the infante and of John II and had proved it in such a way that the
concessions made to the Castilians in the Treaty of Tordesillas had not
been infringed, and indeed seemed to be trifling. Small wonder that
Dom Manuel lost no time in assuming the titles of ‘ Lord of the Conquest,
Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’.

No sooner had Gama returned than King Manuel sent forth a new fleet
to India. It consisted of thirteen ships and was commanded by Pedro
Alvares Cabral, a young courtier who was accompanied by such tried
discoverers as Bartolomeu Dias and Duarte Pacheco. One ship became
separated off the Cape Verde Islands; the rest sailed south-west until they
found signs of land and on 22 April 1500 discovered the Brazilian coast
in what is now the state of Espirito Santo, naming it the Land of the True
Cross. It has been much discussed whether this discovery of Brazil was
accidental or by design. There is no evidence that Cabral experienced bad
weather or adverse winds that might have taken him unwillingly so far
west: both Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama would probably have
recommended him to stand well out from the African coast, and his course
is not far west of the route still recommended for sailing ships seeking the
Cape of Good Hope. It has been maintained that Manuel already knew
of the existence of land across the south Atlantic and that Cabral was
instructed to visit it. There is, of course, no reason why Manuel or anyone
else should not have suspected the existence of this land : the accounts of
Cabral’s journey are tantalisingly inconclusive on this point.

A ship was sent home with the news and the rest of the fleet continued
to India. Four of them were lost with all hands but the rest duly arrived
at Calicut. Cabral had wisely brought suitable presents for the samorin,
but the Muslim traders took effective measures to prevent the Portuguese
from obtaining the goods they sought; and, when Cabral seized a Muslim
ship with a load of spices, his trading post was attacked and his factor
and his assistants were killed. Cabral then seized ten Muslim ships and
departed for Cochin and Cananor where he completed his cargo. Only
six of his thirteen ships reached Lisbon in July 1501, though their cargoes
fully repaid the cost of the whole expedition.

It had already been decided that regular trading operations should be
begun and that a fleet should leave Lisbon annually in March. The news
of Cabral’s difficulties caused a new discussion to be held about the wisdom

426

THE NEW WORLD

of pursuing the Indian enterprise, but the majority was now in favour of
it, and it was decided to send out forces that could, if necessary, fight it
out with the Muslims : once they were eliminated, the Hindu rulers would
have no recourse but to trade with the Portuguese. Thus in 1502 Gama
set out with fifteen ships, to be followed by a second fleet of five. A number
of these were intended to hold off Muslim ships sailing between the Red
Sea and India and to provide naval protection for the factories at Cochin
and Cananor: the rest formed the usual trading fleet. On his way out
Gama stopped at Kilwa and extracted a handsome tribute in gold from
the native ruler, while his first act in India was to bombard Calicut as a
punishment for the murder of Cabral’s factors. By now the Portuguese
were committed to intervention in Indian affairs: they were already
friends of the ruler of Cochin and enemies of the samorin of Calicut, and
in the following years their trading activities were interpersed with
the building of forts and the conduct of campaigns on behalf of their
allies. The expedition of Dom Francisco de Almeida, the first viceroy
of India, in 1505, led to the establishment of forts in East Africa and
at Cochin, Anjediva and Cananor, where the Portuguese defended them-
selves with a stone fort and found large quantities of pepper and other
goods.

The appearance of the Portuguese in eastern waters was at once followed
by the creation of an Egyptian fleet, which attempted to clear a way to
India with disastrous effects on itself, for it was decisively defeated by
Francisco de Almeida at Diu in February 1509. The same year saw the
appointment of Afonso de Albuquerque as governor of India, and in the
following six years the foundations of Portuguese power in the East were
laid. The whole of the traffic of the Orient was to be controlled from
a small group of fortified ports which would serve as military bases
and trading centres. The first and most important of these was Goa,
which Albuquerque wrested from the sultan of Bijapur in 1510 and which
now took the place of Calicut as the headquarters of all Portuguese
operations in the East. Two years later Malacca was seized, and became
an advanced post for trade with Java, Siam and Pegu : its command of
the Malay Straits gave the Portuguese control over most of the commerce
between the Near and Far East. Their command of the sea routes of the
Indian Ocean was still incomplete, since the attempt to take Aden failed,
but in 1515 the capture of Ormuz gave them the key to the Persian Gulf.
A strict and fairly effective licensing system was applied to all ocean shipping
moving east and west of India, and it was to this domination of the carrying
trade that the Portuguese mainly owed their power and prosperity.
During these years, the Portuguese became one of the strongest trading
nations in Europe: Lisbon was marvellously enriched: Dom Manuel
became an absolute monarch: adventurers flocked to Lisbon to make
their fortunes by holding the gorgeous East in fee.

427

THE RENAISSANCE

So resounding was the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of India and so great
the effort required to support it that the acquisition of Brazil was at first
little regarded. An atmosphere of disillusionment hung over the lands
beyond the Atlantic from the time of Columbus’s second voyage until
the conquest of Mexico. The continent of Asia was not found, and the
quantity of gold recovered from the Caribbean Islands was small. With
the breaking of Columbus’s monopoly, Castilian seamen continued to
seek the elusive passage to India, gradually probing the coastline north
and south and establishing that the mainland reported by Columbus in
1498 was in fact a continuous land-mass and that it offered no immediate
contact with Asia. Even in the year or two before Cabral’s expedition,
Columbus’s successors had reached the coast of what is now northern
Brazil from Venezuela, and although the evidence is confused and not
contemporary, it is likely that Vicente Yanez Pinzon’s Mar Dulce, which
he reached at the same time as Cabral reached ‘Vera Cruz’, was the
mouth of the Amazon. In the previous June another Castilian expedition,
possibly commanded by Hojeda, had made a landfall at what is thought
to have been the Assu delta (Rio Grande do Norte), and this expedition
may have been that of Vespucci’s first voyage. It seems probable that the
Castilian expedition of 1499 was the first to sight what is now Brazilian
territory, that Pinzon was the first to coast along a considerable stretch
of Brazilian shore, but that Cabral was the first to strike Brazil as a
separate discovery and the first to land.

The maps of Cantino and Canerio show that an enormous length of
coastland was discovered between 1500 and 1504, though records of
individual expeditions are confusing. On the return of Cabral’s messenger-
ship, King Manuel sent three caravels to explore Brazil, and they met
the remains of Cabral’s fleet on its return from India at the Cape Verdes.
It was probably this expedition that sailed down the Brazilian coast from
about eight degrees south to thirty-two degrees, when it was forced back
by cold and storms according to Antonio Galvao (c. 1550) and which is
referred to by Vespucci as his second voyage. Of the long journey from
eight degrees to thirty-two degrees south Vespucci says merely that nothing
of value was found ‘save endless dye-wood trees and cassia and the tree
that makes negrol and other marvels that cannot be described’. The very
brevity of this description suggests that the main purpose of the expedition
was to sail as far south as possible in quest of a western sea route to
India. The fact that none was found and that Cabral’s ‘island of Vera
Cruz’ was shown to be a continuous mainland affords Vespucci’s chief
claim to have given his name to America. He certainly did not discover
it; but he may have been the first to demonstrate that it was a new
continent.

The voyage of 1503 referred to by Damiao de Gois and described by
Vespucci explicitly aimed at the discovery of a south-western passage,

428

THE NEW WORLD

and succeeded in establishing a fort in southern Brazil and in loading
a cargo of dye-wood for Lisbon. On the return of this expedition,
the Portuguese Crown seems to have decided that the south-western
sea route was still a desirable but not an immediate objective. It was
plain that this coast, inhabited only by scattered tribes of primitive
Indians, some of whom were cannibals, offered little attraction to a
trading nation with the exception of the large quantities of dye-wood —
from which it was now to take the name of Brazil — and such fancy
goods as monkeys and parrots. Manuel therefore adopted the same
procedure as Afonso V had done in Guinea: the dye-wood trade was
leased to a comerso merchant, Fernao de Loronha or Noronha, on con-
dition that ships were sent to explore 300 leagues of coast a year for
three years.

As early as 1503 a French ship from Harfteur, aided by two Portuguese,
reached the middle Brazilian coast. Although immediate steps were taken
to prohibit the export of maps and charts, to prevent Portuguese seamen
from sailing in foreign ships, and to obtain from the pope a confirmation
of Portuguese rights under the Treaty of Tordesillas, the French now
knew all they needed to know, and despite numerous protests continued
to cut dye-wood and trade with the Brazilian natives. Intrusions, conflicts
and protests continued for some years, until finally it became abundantly
clear that Portugal must either occupy Brazil or share it permanently
with the intruders. In 1526 John III began to send armed fleets to drive
off the French, and soon after to settle and fortify the points at which
trade was conducted.

This running conflict with the French coincided with a difference of
opinion with Spain. Although the lands disposed of by the Treaty of Torde-
sillas had not been demarcated, no serious quarrel about the delimitation
of the Portuguese and Spanish areas had occurred in the quarter of a
century that followed it. At this time the Spaniards were engaged mainly
in setting up an administration in Hispaniola and in exploring and
dominating the neighbouring islands, far from the Portuguese sphere.
Portuguese seamen who strayed into the Caribbean might be arrested,
and so might Spaniards seeking the south-west passage who came ashore
in Brazil. But it was only the defection of Magellan to Castile and his
success in reaching the Philippines by the south-westerly route that raised
again the question of ownership of access to the true India. Under the
dispensation of Tordesillas the Spaniards could claim what they reached
by sailing westwards and the Portuguese what they found by going to
the east. It was now necessary to draw a line corresponding to that of
Tordesillas in the east. The main bone of contention was the Spice Islands,
the much-coveted source of some of the most valuable of oriental
products. After several years of haggling it was agreed by the Treaty of
Saragossa in 1529 that the islands should remain with Portugal, but

30 429 NCMH I

THE RENAISSANCE

that an indemnity of 350,000 ducats should be paid to Spain. Thus the
whole world, newly discovered and still to be explored, was divided
between the two peninsular Powers.

2 . THE SPANIARDS IN THE NEW WORLD, I493-I52I

The settlement of Spanish America began with Columbus’s second
voyage. The first voyage had been a successful reconnaissance, carefully
planned and ably executed. Making, by good fortune, the best of the
North Atlantic wind system, Columbus had sailed from the Canaries
to the Bahamas before the north-east trades, and back to the Azores in
the zone of the westerly winds of winter. He had discovered the two
largest islands of the Antilles, Cuba and Hispaniola. He claimed, and
believed until his death, that he had found islands lying off the coast of
eastern Asia, and possibly part of the mainland too. We cannot be sure
whether these claims agreed with Columbus’s original intentions and
promises, nor whether Ferdinand and Isabella entirely accepted them —
some intelligent contemporaries certainly did not. But beyond doubt
Columbus had discovered an extensive archipelago of hitherto unknown
islands which yielded some gold and were inhabited by a peaceful and
tractable, though extremely primitive, people. Whether these islands were
really within striking distance of the settled parts of Asia remained to be
seen; but they were certainly worth careful investigation.

The first voyage, though successful, had been expensive. Columbus had
lost his flagship and had been compelled to leave half his men behind in
Hispaniola to face an uncertain fate. The plunder he had secured was
negligible in proportion to the cost of the enterprise. It was now essential
to follow up the discovery and to produce a return on the investment.
Immediately upon receipt of Columbus’s first report, and even before his
arrival in their presence, the sovereigns commanded him to begin his
preparations for a second voyage. Shortly afterwards, they embarked
upon negotiations with the Papacy and with Portugal, in order to secure
a monopoly of navigation and settlement in the seas and lands which
Columbus had discovered.

The negotiations with the Papacy presented little difficulty. Alexander VI
was himself a Spaniard, already under heavy obligations to the Catholic
monarchs and looking to them for support in his endeavour to create a
principality in Italy for his son. His predecessors had conferred on
Portugal the monopoly of exploration and missionary activity in West
Africa, and Alexander was more than willing to do as much for Spain.
He issued a series of four bulls, each successively strengthening and extend-
ing the provisions of the previous ones, in accordance with successive
demands made by Ferdinand and Isabella, upon Columbus’s advice.
The first two granted to the sovereigns of Castile all lands discovered, or

430

THE NEW WORLD

to be discovered, in the regions explored by Columbus. The third, the
famous Inter caetera, drew an imaginary boundary from north to south
a hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, and
provided that the land and sea beyond the line should be a Spanish sphere
of exploration. The fourth, Dudum siquidem, extended the previous grants
to include ‘all islands and mainlands whatever, found or to be found. . .
in sailing or travelling towards the west and south, whether they be in
regions occidental or meridional and oriental and of India ’ ; further, all
grants previously made in the regions mentioned were cancelled, even if
they had been followed by actual possession. Whatever the international
force of these enactments — and Catholic opinion was divided in the
matter — the four bulls constituted for Spaniards the basic legal claim of
the Spanish Crown to the lands of the New World.

The counter-claims of Portugal, however, could not easily be brushed
aside. John II, suspicious of Italian exaggeration, had never accepted
Columbus’s interpretation of the discoveries. To him the ‘Indies’ were
another group of islands in the Atlantic, and at first he laid claim to them
as such under the terms of the Treaty of Alcacovas of 1479. Clearly
Portugal would not go to war over the possession of a few distant islands
inhabited by naked savages, gold or no gold; but Dudum siquidem gave
serious cause for alarm. The generosity of its terms, and the specific
reference to India, implied a threat to plans which the Portuguese had
cherished for years. All the resources of diplomacy and of geographical
reasoning were used, therefore, to limit the effect of the bull. John II,
having failed to move the pope, opened direct negotiations with Ferdinand
and Isabella. He accepted the bull of demarcation. Inter caetera, as a
basis for discussion, but asked that the boundary line be moved 270 leagues
farther west. The Spanish monarchs, secure in the delusions which Colum-
bus had fostered concerning the western route to India, agreed; both
sides must in any case have realised that so vague a boundary could not
be fixed with accuracy, and each thought that the other was deceived.
Both sides, moreover, were anxious to avoid open conflict. The Treaty
of Tordesillas was duly signed in 1494, a signal diplomatic triumph for
Portugal, confirming to the Portuguese not only the true route to India,
but the whole of the South Atlantic with the imaginary land of Antilla
and the real land of Brazil; though probably that was not known, even
in Lisbon, at the time.

Columbus was back in the West Indies long before the treaty was
signed. He left Cadiz in September 1493 in command of a large fleet,
ships, caravels and pinnaces, seventeen sail in all. The composition of
the fleet, no less than the instructions which the admiral carried, indicated
the purpose for which it was sent. It contained no heavily armed fighting
ships; it carried no trade goods, other than the small truck normally
taken to West Africa for barter with savages. Its chief cargo was men —

431 3 0-2

THE RENAISSANCE

twelve hundred people, priests, gentleman-soldiers, artisans, farmers —
and agricultural stock — tools, seeds and animals; a whole society in
miniature. The immediate object of the voyage, then, was not to open a
new trade or to conquer oriental kingdoms, but to settle the island of
Hispaniola, to found a mining and farming colony which should produce
its own food, pay for the cost of the voyage by remitting gold to Spain,
and serve at the same time as a base for further exploration in the direction
of India or Cathay. There had been no lack of volunteers. The talk of
gold in itself was enough to attract them. For men-at-arms, unemployed
through the decline of private war and the fall of Granada, the Indies
offered adventurous service, plunder, and the possibility of landed ease.
For humbler folk there was the hope of escape from the harsh uplands
of Castile, overrun by the privileged flocks of the Mesta, to a place where
soil and climate were kind and native labour cheap and plentiful. The
fleet was fitted out under the orders of Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca,
archdeacon of Seville, who was to have a long and influential connection
with the Indies. Columbus complained bitterly of Fonseca, whom he
thought obstructive and dilatory. Sea-going commanders are often
impatient of the red tape of dock-yard administration, and the two men
seem to have disliked one another personally. In fact, the fitting-out was
done with great efficiency and remarkable speed : five months was a very
short time for the preparation of so large a fleet in fifteenth-century
Spain. Fonseca’s only serious mistake was failure to provide the colony
with enough food for the first year; over-optimism about the extent to
which Europeans could live off the country in the tropics was a common
feature of these early explorations, and was one of the chief causes of the
difficulties which Columbus encountered.

The fleet made a prosperous passage and a good landfall, at Dominica,
and passed along the beautiful arc of the lesser Antilles, through the
Virgin Islands, past Puerto Rico, to the north coast of Hispaniola. There
Columbus’s good fortune ended. The settlement of Navidad, planted on
the first voyage, had been wiped out; in selecting as a site for his second
settlement the unprotected, unhealthy shore which he named Isabela,
Columbus made his first serious blunder. Isabela never prospered. It
would have taken a leader of commanding genius to maintain discipline
among those early Spanish settlers — touchy, adventurous and greedy as
they were — to compel them to clear the forest, build houses, and plant
crops, instead of roaming about the island in search of gold or of slaves.
Great explorer and sea commander, brilliant navigator though he was,
Columbus had neither the experience nor the temperament of a successful
colonial governor. He was, moreover, a foreigner and the son of an
artisan tricked out with an empty title and a new coat of arms. It soon
became a question whether he and his officers could keep his men in
hand until the relief fleet arrived.

432

THE NEW WORLD

The search for India could not be delayed, however, and after sending
some of the most troublesome away to explore the interior, Columbus
again set sail with three caravels, to explore the south coast of Cuba and
to discover Jamaica. On his return to Isabela, he found his people
weakened by sickness and at open enmity with the natives. The Tainos,
unwarlike gatherers of roots and shellfish, lacking all but the most
rudimentary agriculture, armed with feeble tools and weapons of wood
or stone, had been exasperated to the point of war by incessant demands
for food and women. Columbus turned upon the Indians, hunted them
through the forest with armed men and savage dogs, and imposed upon
them a poll-tax of gold dust which they could not pay. The captives in
this pitiful warfare were enslaved. Columbus shipped some hundreds to
Spain, where most of them died. The remainder were released and sent
back by the orders of the queen, so that even the slave trade brought no
profit. Meanwhile, at Isabela, the surviving Indians left their land untilled,
and famine threatened the Spaniards who remained in the wretched
fever-ridden camp.

Matters were in this state when, in the spring of 1496, Columbus
sailed for Spain to deal with the complaints which had been carried there
by malcontents from Isabela. In his absence, but with his approval, his
brother Bartolome, whom he left in charge, organised the removal of the
settlement from Isabela to a better site on the south coast. There, in 1496
or 1497, the colonists began to build the town of Santo Domingo, which
was to be for half a century the capital of the Spanish Indies, and which
survives as a thriving city today.

The Catholic monarchs still trusted Columbus. With their support
and at their expense he returned to the Indies in 1498; but this time there
were few volunteers and men had to be pressed, or released from prison,
to sail with the admiral. Columbus sailed to the south of his former
course, to discover the island of Trinidad and the mouths of the Orinoco,
by far the largest river then known to Europeans, whose great volume of
fresh water proved the new-found coast to be part of a mighty continent.
By ill-luck he missed the pearl-bearing oyster-beds off the Venezuelan
coast, but sailed directly north from Margarita, by a remarkable feat of
navigation, to Hispaniola, to the new city which his brother had founded.

At Santo Domingo Columbus found half his settlers, under the alcalde
Francisco Roldan, in open revolt against the authority of Bartolome.
Columbus could not, or did not, suppress the revolt by force, but bought
off Roldan and his followers by concessions — pardon, restoration to
office, and free land grants. Besides consenting to these humiliating
terms, the admiral made at this time another and more significant con-
cession to the rebels, the division of the Indians of the island among the
Spanish settlers as servants and estate labourers. This repartimiento
system later became general in a modified form throughout the Spanish

433

THE RENAISSANCE

Indies. Forced labour, together with smallpox and measles, accelerated
the decline in numbers of the native peoples of the Greater Antilles;
but for the time the arrangement served its turn in pacifying the leaders of
the rebellion, and Columbus was able to suppress subsequent minor
Spanish revolts with a severity probably overdue. The damage was done,
however. Where Columbus’s policy had been weak, malcontents returning
to Spain were able to represent it as tyrannical. In the spring of 1499
the sovereigns appointed Francisco de Bobadilla to supersede Columbus
and to investigate the complaints against him. Bobadilla sent the admiral
home in irons. Though his sovereigns restored his title and property and
treated him with all courtesy to the end, Columbus was never again
allowed to exercise his offices of admiral and viceroy or to interfere in the
government of his island of Hispaniola.

The real beginnings of settled government in the Indies date from the
arrival of Bobadilla’s successor, Frey Nicolas de Ovando, knight
commander of Alcantara, who governed Hispaniola for six years with a
severity far harsher than Columbus had ever dared to exercise. Discipline,
indeed, was what the settlers chiefly needed. As for the Indians, Ovando
secured a royal decree in 1503 giving legal form to the repartimientos
begun by Columbus. From the subjugated Indians the invaders exacted
tribute and forced labour in return for conversion and protection. Against
the wild Indians they waged relentless war. Probably the Tainos were
doomed already, and Ovando’s severities only hastened their extinction.
Nevertheless, during his time, Spanish landholders achieved a modest
prosperity, pasturing great herds of pigs and homed cattle upon open
ranges, and growing yams, cassava, and even a little sugar cane, which
they ground in horse- or water-mills. Oviedo gave the number of mills
in his time as twenty-four, which represented a considerable capital
investment. The production of gold from the streams of Hispaniola
also increased steadily, and reached in the second decade of the sixteenth
century a quantity sufficient to attract the interest and the cupidity of
Ferdinand and his advisers.

Lack of labour was the chief hindrance to the development of Hispaniola.
The settlers resorted to slave-raiding in the Bahamas in order to replace
the dying Tainos, and a little later negro slaves began to be imported in
small numbers from the Portuguese factories in West Africa; but there
was never enough labour. To men of the temperament of the early
Spanish settlers land was useless without hands to work it; even gold
mining was tedious work which called for unskilled labour. It was lack of
labour, as much as greed for gold, missionary zeal, or simple restlesness,
which drove many Spaniards on from Hispaniola to settle in other islands
and mainlands, where the native population might prove more numerous
and more hardy. Hispaniola became, as its founders had intended, the
base for further exploration and the source of bacon, dried beef and

434

THE NEW WORLD

cassava bread to victual the exploring expeditions which sailed out in
ever-increasing numbers during the government of Ovando’s successor,
the old admiral’s son Diego Colon.

In 1509 Juan de Esquivel began the settlement of Jamaica, or at least
of the area round New Seville, near what is now St Ann’s Bay, where
Columbus had beached his worm-riddled caravels five years before.
Jamaica yielded no precious metals. It supported a small population of
Spaniards who lived by cattle-ranching, but was never of much importance
in Spanish times. The much larger enterprise of settling Cuba was under-
taken in 15 1 1, by Diego Velasquez, who had been lieutenant-governor of
Hispaniola under Ovando. Velasquez, like Ovando, was a disciplinarian
and an administrator of considerable ability. With a small force of personal
followers he put down native resistance and occupied the whole island
within three years. He showed unusual skill and foresight in selecting
the best localities for the establishment of Spanish settlements; during
the first five years of his governorship he founded seven towns, and though
both the names and precise sites of several of them changed more than
once, they all survived in the districts where they were founded. Cuba
produced considerable quantities of gold, and being both more fertile
and less mountainous than Hispaniola it offered better opportunities
for ranching, tobacco farming and sugar planting. As in Hispaniola the
labour for mines and farms was procured in the early years by the
repartimientos of the native population. Cuba attracted many settlers
from Hispaniola, and for a time at least Velasquez succeeded in making
himself practically independent of the governor of the older colony.

The fourth major island settlement, that of Puerto Rico, which began
in 1512, was less immediately successful. Intrusive groups of Caribs
from the Lesser Antilles had already established themselves in Puerto
Rico, and offered a much more formidable resistance to the Spaniards
than the natives of Hispaniola had done. The attention of the first governor,
Juan Ponce de Leon, was moreover divided between the island itself and
the peninsula of Florida, where he made an unsuccessful attempt to
settle in 1514. The settlement of Puerto Rico, in consequence, was slower,
more sanguinary and less complete than that of the other islands, and
the colony never attracted large numbers of Spaniards in the sixteenth
century.

While the Greater Antilles were thus being subdued and settled, other
longer, more dangerous and more speculative expeditions were sailing
from Hispaniola to explore the mainland coasts of the Caribbean. Even
during the admiral’s lifetime, his monopoly of exploration of ‘islands
and mainlands’ had been infringed several times, with the connivance
of the Crown. In 1499 Vicente Yanez Pinzon, former captain of the
caravel Nina and companion of Columbus, in a notable and courageous
voyage, had coasted northern Brazil and found the delta of the Amazon.

435

THE RENAISSANCE

Alonso de Hojeda, also an old companion of Columbus and a constant
source of trouble to him, in the same year had followed up the admiral’s
third voyage to the Gulf of Paria, explored the coast of Venezuela and
discovered the valuable pearl fishery of Margarita. With him had sailed
Amdrigo Vespucci, whose ready pen and sound geographical judgment
were to bring him a fame which for a time eclipsed that of Columbus
himself. The little island of Cubagua became the site of the Spanish
settlement of New Cadiz, founded to exploit the pearl fishery. For
about twenty-five years, until over-fishing destroyed its source of wealth,
New Cadiz was one of the most prosperous places in the Caribbean,
and the centre of a thriving and very brutal trade in slaves to serve as
divers.

More permanent, and more significant for the future, were the settle-
ments in Central America, on the isthmus coast which Columbus had
found on his fourth voyage and where the Columbus family later held
their only mainland possession, the little duchy of Veragua. The shores of
the Gulf of Darien had been visited in 1500 by Rodrigo de Bastidas,
accompanied by Columbus’s old pilot and cartographer Juan de la Cosa.
In 1504 de la Cosa carried out a more thorough exploration, in which
Amerigo Vespucci also took part. Their reports decided the Crown in
favour of mainland settlement, and, despite the protests of Diego Colon,
two licences were issued, one to Diego de Nicuesa for the settlement of
Veragua, the other to Alonso de Hojeda for what is now the north coast
of Colombia. The two expeditions, which sailed at the end of 1509,
numbered together over a thousand men, but hunger, sickness and
poisoned arrows soon killed all but a few score. This was the most serious
loss which the Spaniards had suffered in America up to that time, and
one of the earliest casualties was Juan de la Cosa, whom Spain could ill
spare. Reinforcements eventually arrived, under the command of one
of the judges in Hispaniola, Martin Fernandez de Enciso; but the real
leadership devolved, by common consent, upon a popular desperado,
Vasco Nunez de Balboa. Balboa had the advantage of local knowledge,
having sailed with Bastidas in 1500; he was decisive, unscrupulous, and
no respecter of persons. He shipped Enciso back to Hispaniola (Hojeda
had gone already), turned Nicuesa adrift to drown, and assumed command
of the whole enterprise. Balboa was the first of the great conquistadores
of the American mainland, and Oviedo, who knew him well, is a convincing
witness of his courage, his ability, and — by the admittedly savage stan-
dards of that time and place — his humanity. He founded the city of
Darien; he achieved an ascendency over the Indians of the isthmus by
a combination of force, terror, conciliation and diplomacy; he collected
from them great quantities of both food and gold, but at the same time
compelled his own people to make provision for the future by building
houses and planting crops. Most important of all, in 1513, following up

436

THE NEW WORLD

an Indian report, he led an expedition through the dripping forests of the
isthmus to the shores of the Pacific.

Balboa’s discovery not only revealed to Europeans the existence of
the ‘South Sea’; it revealed also how narrow a strip of land separated
the two oceans, and so gave a new encouragement to those who hoped
to find a strait through Central America and a westward all-sea route to
the East. It was partly that hope which prompted the exploration of the
Caribbean coasts of the isthmus, and, as soon as boats could be built,
the Pacific coast also. The conquest of Central America was thus in a sense
an incident in the race between Spaniards and Portuguese to reach the
East. In the same year (1513) that Balboa crossed the isthmus, the first
Portuguese ships reached the Moluccas. In the same year (1519) that
Cortes landed in Mexico, Magellan sailed on the voyage which was to
reveal both the true western route to the East, and the daunting size of
the Pacific. Magellan’s voyage also revealed that the Spaniards had lost
the race; but in Central America they had a reward of a different sort.
Though they failed to find a strait, they founded a great empire.

Both as a discoverer and as an architect of empire, Balboa deserved
well of his comrades and his king; but, like Columbus, he suffered from
the tale-bearing of enemies who returned to Spain. The king was under-
standably concerned over the loss of Nicuesa and Juan de la Cosa, and
resented the affront to his authority in the person of Enciso. Balboa’s
report on the discovery of the Pacific, supported by samples of pearls
and gold, arrived too late to affect the royal decision; the first royal
governor of Darien, appointed in 1513, was not Balboa, but Pedro Arias
de Avila, the terrible old man whom his contemporaries called furor
Domini. Pedrarias drove on with great energy the work of exploration
and settlement, but abandoned entirely Balboa’s policy of conciliating
the Indians and undid much of Balboa’s constructive work. He and his
captains ruled, exploited and devastated the isthmus for sixteen years.
Balboa himself fell victim to Pedrarias’s jealousy ; he was tried on a charge
of treason in 1519 and beheaded.

The appointment of Pedrarias as governor of Darien, though disastrous
in itself, marked a new determination on the part of the Crown to control
the activities of its subjects in the Indies. Ferdinand had already set
aside the claims of the Columbus family on the mainland ; he now made
it clear that authority in those settlements was to reside in officers appoin-
ted by the Crown and not in self-appointed leaders. Already in the islands
there was a recognised organisation for carrying the royal will into effect.
A court of appeal had been established at Santo Domingo in 1511, a
fore-runner of the audiencias of school-trained lawyers which were later
to exert so profound an influence on the government of the empire; and
although the authority of Diego Colon did not extend to the mainland,
the appellate jurisdiction of the audiencia did. In the same year, 1511, a

437

THE RENAISSANCE

standing committee of the council of Castile had been appointed in
Spain to advise the king on the government of the Indies. Its chairman
was Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, whose bureaucratic methods had so
irritated Columbus. On the financial side, the Casa de la Contratacion
had been established at Seville as early as 1503 to regulate trade with
America; and as each new settlement was founded, royal officials were
appointed to protect the financial interests of the Crown. It was in such
a capacity that Oviedo accompanied Pedrarias to Panama.

One of the most urgent tasks of the young administration was to
regulate the relations between conquering Spaniards and conquered
Indians. The reaction against the reckless exploitation of the natives in
the islands began with a Christmas sermon preached by Fray Antonio de
Montesinos at Santo Domingo in 15 11, which gave great offence to
Spaniards in the island and caused a considerable stir in Spain. Montesinos
was sent home by his fellow Dominicans to plead the cause of the Indians
at court, and after much deliberation the king’s advisers produced the
Laws of Burgos of 1512, the first European colonial code, which among
a mass of detailed regulation enunciated three clear principles : the Indians
were free men, not slaves; they were to be converted to Christianity by
peaceful means, not by force; and they were to be made to work. The
repartimiento or encomienda system introduced by Columbus and regu-
larised by Ovando was to be continued, but the demands of labour and
tribute made upon Indians by Spaniards were limited, and the encomen-
deros were to carry out their side of the bargain (protection and religious
instruction) and to observe a whole series of rules designed to prevent
ill-treatment. This definition of native rights was, for the Dominican
agitators, unsatisfactory and inadequate; but at least the Crown had
admitted by a formal enactment that the Indians had rights, and there-
after the royal conscience was not allowed to slumber. Montesinos, having
made his protest, relapsed into silence, so far as is known; but other
religious took up his work, urging better treatment and greater liberty
for Indians and closer control over the Spaniards. Most prominent among
these followers of Montesinos was the great Dominican missionary and
polemist, Bartolome de las Casas, whose writings and sermons were to
influence the colonial policy of Spain for over half a century.

At the time of Balboa’s death at the hands of Pedrarias, therefore,
there existed a rudimentary system of colonial administration and the
beginnings of a native policy. Both the system and the policy were soon
to be applied on a scale undreamed of, to peoples more numerous and
better organised than any the Spaniards had yet encountered in America.
Scattered through tropical America, mainly in highland areas, were a
number of distinct peoples who, though lacking wheeled vehicles and
beasts of burden, and using tools of wood or stone, had nevertheless
achieved a remarkable skill in some of the arts, in sculpture and building,

438

THE NEW WORLD

and in handicraft industries, including the working of soft metals. Their
basic crop was maize, a cereal more productive and more sustaining than
the cassava of the islands; and they had brought the hoe-cultivation of
maize to a high level by means of well-organised systems of communal
work. Their principal settlements, adorned with stone or adobe temples
and community-houses, were large enough to be called cities. In two
centres at least (the valley of Mexico and the central plateau of the Andes)
warlike tribes had established themselves as overlords, exacting tribute
and forced labour from subject peoples over a wide area ; and had set up
political organisations bearing a superficial resemblance to empires or
kingdoms in the Old World sense. Among Spaniards the wealth and power
of these peoples lost nothing in the telling; and for pious Christians their
religions had a horrible fascination, combining, as in some cases they did,
messianic legends of familiar beauty with revolting rites of human sacrifice
and ritual cannibalism.

None of these ancient city-builders of the New World was a sea-faring
people. Their chief centres were all well inland, and for that reason the
Spaniards for some years remained unaware of their existence. Even the
great Maya cities of Yucatan were difficult of access from the sea. The
first of the ancient ‘empires’ to be discovered, attacked and subjugated
was that established in Central Mexico by the Aztecs, an intrusive and
warlike people whose capital city, Tenochtitlan, was built upon islands
in the lake of Texcoco. Over-crowding on these islands had driven the
Aztecs to expand; and by a series of wars and alliances in the century
before the arrival of the Spaniards they had extended their influence
west and south nearly to the Gulf Coast, where Spaniards engaged in
coastal exploration found the evidence of their activities and heard stories
of their power.

The isthmus, Castilla del Oro, had been settled from Hispaniola. The
men who explored and invaded Mexico came from Cuba, and the leading
spirit in the work of preparation was the able and ambitious governor,
Diego Velasquez. Velasquez’s people had for some time been slave-raiding
in the Bay Islands off the Honduras coast, and there perhaps found evi-
dence of trade with the more developed cultures of the mainland. Small
expeditions were sent from Cuba in 1517 and 1518 to reconnoitre the
coast of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1519, as a result of their
reports, Velasquez fitted out a much larger fleet with a view to trade
and exploration, and appointed as its commander Heman Cort6s, who
had been his private secretary, and was financially a partner in the enter-
prise. Cortes was personally popular and the project attracted a force
of about 600 volunteers, a large number for that sparsely settled country.
Velasquez and Cortes did not trust one another, and probably Cortes
from the start contemplated the conquest of an independent kingdom.
He left Cuba in clandestine haste, and upon landing lost no time in

439

THE RENAISSANCE

repudiating Velasquez’s authority. From that moment the enterprise was
Cortes’s own.

The conquest of Mexico is the best known and best documented of all
the Spanish campaigns in the New World. There are four surviving
eye-witness accounts, of which two at least are of unusual literary and
historical merit. Cortes’s own letters are graphic and detailed, though
inevitably affected by political considerations and by a natural tendency
to represent all decisions as Cortes’s own. The corrective is to be found in
the True History of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, which tells the story from
the point of view of a loyal and intelligent non-commissioned officer who
happened to possess a remarkable memory. But besides being well-
known and well-told, the story of the conquest represents perfectly and
characteristically the three main strands in the psychological make-up
of the conquistadores — their wolfish greed for gold, for land, and for
slaves; their passionate longing to strike down the heathen and to win
souls for Christ; and, more subtle but not less compelling, their love of
great deeds for their own sake. It was this last feeling, this pride in doing
great deeds, which made the rank and file applaud actions of their leaders
which they knew to be imprudent, which held them together in the face
of disaster and led them, almost without thinking, to attempt the seemingly
impossible. They thought of themselves not as imitators but as equals
and rivals of the heroes of ancient times ; and certainly there are no stories
in classical legend or medieval romance more marvellous than this
conquest of a great, if semi-barbarous, empire by a handful of down-at-
heel swordsmen.

Cortes landed near what is now Vera Cruz and began operations by
two symbolic acts. The first was the destruction of the ships in which
he had come. By so doing Cortes prevented malcontents returning to
Cuba, freed the sailors to march with the army, and satisfied the con-
quistador's love of a dramatic gesture with a classical analogy. The
second was the ceremonious founding of a municipality. To the magistrates
of the ‘town’ of Vera Cruz Cortes resigned the commission he had re-
ceived in Cuba; from them, as representatives of the Spanish Crown in
Mexico, he received a new commission, and wrote at once to the emperor
for confirmation of it. Having thus legalised as best he could his assumption
of an independent command, he led his army up the long and rugged
climb from the steamy jungles of Vera Cruz to the high plateau of Central
Mexico.

To the modern traveller Cortes’s route seems almost perversely difficult;
it included two high passes, that between Orizaba and the Cofre de Perote
in Vera Cruz State, and the Paso de Cortes between the twin snow peaks
Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Neither pass carries a usable road today.
The route was dictated largely by political considerations, by the need to
travel as far as possible through friendly territory. Between Vera Cruz

440

THE NEW WORLD

and Tenochtitlan were many pueblos which paid tribute unwillingly to
their Aztec overlords; and one town, with its surrounding countryside,
which was still holding out against the Aztecs. By a mixture of force
and diplomacy Cortes was able to quicken the resentment of Cempoala
and neighbouring pueblos into active revolt ; and after sharp fighting he
achieved an offensive alliance with the recalcitrant town of Tlaxcala.
These friendly towns helped the Spaniards with food, with porters, with
fighting auxiliaries, and, most important of all, with information. In
Cempoala Cortds first heard of Quetzalcoatl, the god-hero of Toltec
mythology, whose return to earth was expected by Mexican augurers
about the time that the Spaniards landed. From the redoubtable warriors
of Tlaxcala, Cortes must have learned much about the military strength
and weakness of the Aztecs. Embassies arrived in the camp, bringing
presents whose value and workmanship revealed the wealth of Mexico
to the greedy eyes of the waiting Spaniards. They brought also threats
and unconvincing pleas of poverty, in a hopeless attempt to dissuade
Cortes from advancing on the capital. Cortes wisely sent the best of this
glittering treasure home to the emperor (though some of it was inter-
cepted by French privateers and never reached Spain). From the threats
he divined the mixture of defiance and superstitious dread in the mind of
the Aztec war-chief and saw the use which could be made of Montezuma’s
fears. Cortes’s greatness largely consisted in his power of appreciating the
psychological factors in the situation, and in the skill with which he built
up his own prestige alike among his allies and enemies. His chief difficulty
at this stage was in restraining the allies, whose notions of war were
less subtle and more direct. He succeeded in this delicate task; the
advance of the army was orderly and swift, and in due course the Spaniards,
escorted by their Aztec hosts, marched along the causeway into Tenoch-
titlan in a peaceful display of martial pageantry. The Spaniards were
lodged in a great community-house, or palace as they called it, in the
city, while the auxiliaries camped outside, on the shore of the lake. It was
remarkable evidence of Aztec powers of organisation that, in a country
where all transport was on the backs of porters, so many extra mouths
could be fed at such short notice.

Peace was short-lived. The first interruption was the arrival at Vera
Cruz of a powerful force under Panfilo de Narvaez, one of the original
conquerors of Cuba, who had been sent by the governor to apprehend
Cortes. Cortes rushed down to the coast, out-manceuvred Narv&ez, and
by a mixture of threats, bribes and promises enlisted the men from Cuba
under his own command. In his absence, however, the zeal of his lieutenants
in destroying heathen temples, and their incessant demands for food,
had exasperated the Aztecs to the point of war. Montezuma, a dis-
credited captive puppet in Spanish hands, could do nothing to restrain
his people. A new war-chief had been elected, and Cortes’s return with

441

THE RENAISSANCE

reinforcements precipitated the outbreak. His only mistake in the whole
campaign was his re-entry into Tenochtitlan, trusting to his own prestige
and to Montezuma’s authority. Montezuma was stoned to death by his
own people, and Cortes had to fight his way out of the city along the
broken causeways by night, losing in that one night a third of his men and
most of his baggage. The auxiliary tribes remained loyal to the alliance,
however. The army was able to retire on Tlaxcala and re-form for a more
thorough and less spectacular advance. Cortes had boats built for fighting
on the lake, and laid siege to the city, cutting off its fresh water and its
food supply, systematically looting and destroying it building by building
and shovelling the rubble into the lake as he advanced towards the centre,
until at last, in 1521, the surviving Aztecs surrendered. In the beautiful
Spanish city which Cortes began to build upon the site, hardly a trace of
Indian building remains. The place was built over as completely as the
Roman cities of Europe, and the lake is now an arid dusty plain.

The speed of the Mexican campaign, and indeed the speed with which
the conquistadores seized all the chief centres of American civilisation,
compares with the speed of Portuguese commercial expansion in the
East; but the Spanish conquest achieved far more enduring results and
its success is even harder to explain satisfactorily. Generalship counted
for much; but the Indians too had able leaders, and showed themselves
capable at times of adapting their tactics to new conditions: they learned,
for instance, to use rough ground for ambushes instead of fighting in
dense masses in the open, as was their custom. The possession of fire-
arms was an important, but probably not a decisive, factor. A ship
carries its armament wherever it goes; but on land cannon had to be
dragged over mountains and through swamps by human strength. The
army with which Cortes invaded Mexico possessed only a few small cannon
and thirteen muskets. Horses were perhaps more important than guns;
but the Indians soon lost their fear of horses and even learned to ride them.
Cortes had sixteen horses when he landed. For the most part his men
fought on foot with sword, pike and crossbow. They had the advantage
of steel over stone; but they were not a well-equipped European army
fighting a horde of helpless savages.

The Spaniards had unbounded courage and the discipline of necessity.
They had the superior toughness and endurance of a race whose principal
food is wheat over a race whose principal food is maize. Being few in
number they lived off the country, whereas their enemies could not easily
supply large armies in the field for more than a few days. They were able
to exploit some of the legends and superstitions of their adversaries in
such a way as to paralyse opposition, at least temporarily. They were
fighting a dominant warrior tribe which collected tribute by force or by
threats and did little for its subjects in return. They had the help, therefore,
of large numbers of Indian allies who, having never heard of King Log

442

THE NEW WORLD

and King Stork, gleefully attacked their former overlords or rivals.
Without the Tlaxcalans, Cortes could not have pulled down the buildings
of Tenochtitlan. Finally the Spaniards had the advantage of their truculent
missionary faith and the sublime confidence it gave. The Indian believed
that his religion required him to fight and, if he must, to die bravely; the
Spaniard believed that his religion enabled him to win.

Cortes showed genius, not only in holding his own men together, but
in securing at least the passive loyalty of the conquered Indians. He worked
so wisely that there was never afterwards any serious trouble with the
natives of the plateau region. Cortes’s own men, in fact, gave him more
trouble than the Indians. The loot of the conquest proved disappointing;
it could hardly have been otherwise, so high were the soldiers’ expectations.
Cortes was blamed for it, and even accused of hiding treasure for his
own profit. Fortunately for Cortes, Indian society already made economic
provision for rendering tribute and services to an overlord. By distributing
Indian settlements in encomienda among his followers, Cortes enabled a
new Spanish aristocracy to step into the place which the Aztecs and their
allies had formerly occupied, and a new priesthood to supplant the
custodians of the ancient temples. He prudently assigned a due proportion
of tributary villages to the Crown; and retained for himself an encomienda
comprising some 23,000 tributary heads of households, a princely fief.
Meanwhile he found employment for the more ambitious among his
officers in exploring and conquering the Maya lands in the south and in
attempting to subdue the wilder tribes to the west. Alvarado, Olid,
Sandoval, in imitation of Cortes, added great semi-independent provinces
to the kingdom of New Spain. Many of them rivalled Cortes in courage
and surpassed him in ruthlessness ; none equalled him in generalship and
wisdom. By 1524 this southward drive from Mexico met the northward
drive from Darien, and the leaders fell to fighting. Cortes had to take the
field again. His last campaign, the terrible wasting expedition to Honduras,
was fought against Spaniards, in one of the savage civil wars which seemed
the inevitable outcome of every great conquista.

The rule of the conquistadores was quarrelsome and brief. They had
gone to America at their own expense, endured great hardships, risked
their lives and fortunes, such as they were, without help from their govern-
ment at home. Most of them looked forward to a pensioned retirement.
Left to themselves, they would probably have settled in loose communities,
employing the feudal forms which already were anachronisms in Spain,
exploiting the Indians as the needs of the moment dictated, and according
verbal homage but little else to the Crown. The rulers of Spain never for
a moment thought of allowing such a state of affairs to persist. In the
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Crown, with considerable
bloodshed and expense, cut the claws of the great feudal houses, of the
knightly orders and of the privileged local corporations. A growing

443

THE RENAISSANCE

royal absolutism could not tolerate the emergence of a new feudal
aristocracy overseas. Private commanders like Cortes, Pizarro, Belalcazar
and Nuno de Guzman, who depended for their power upon their personal
following, if they escaped the knives of their rivals, were soon displaced
by royal nominees. Lawyers and ecclesiastics took over the direction of
the empire ; cattle ranchers, mining capitalists and the exporting merchants
of Seville exploited its riches. In Mexico, indeed in most parts of Spanish
America, the great age of the conquistadores ended when the principal
settled areas were deemed secure. There was nothing further for them to
do. Forests and empty prairies were not to their taste. Some succeeded
in settling down as ranchers or encomenderos\ some met violent ends;
some lik e Bernal Diaz, lived on in poverty. Not one was trusted by
the Crown with real administrative power. Cortes himself spent his last
years in bored and litigious retirement. He was not the stuff of which
bureaucrats are made.

444

CHAPTER XVI

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN
OF ALL EUROPE

T he discoveries of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were
remarkable, among other peculiarities, for the way in which geo-
graphical scholarship burst the bonds of nationalism in a strongly
nationalistic age. The explorer was in almost the same class as the mer-
cenary soldier, the painter, the sculptor or the goldsmith of that period.
His approach to his problems and his technical skill were moulded by
his national background; but they were at the disposal of whichever
prince or country would pay for them. The Cabots were Venetians in
the service of the English king; Columbus the Genoese would have
served the same king most willingly, or the French or the Portuguese,
instead of the queen of Castile; Verezzano the Florentine carried the
French flag to the mainland of America; Magellan the Portuguese sailed
in the service of Spain. In a slightly later period Henry Hudson the
Londoner set out from Amsterdam in the service of the Dutch East
India Company on his voyage of 1608, while later still the English
Hudson’s Bay Company owed its origins to the persistence and the ex-
perience of two French Canadians, Medard Chouart, sieur des Groseillers,
and Pierre Esprit Radisson.

These men drew on a common fund of cartographical knowledge and
of geographical surmise. There was much that was cosmopolitan, even if
it was not international, in the ‘Period of Discovery’. But cosmopolitan
as the scientific and navigational skills might be, the direction to which
they submitted and the finance to which they owed their successes, were
markedly nationalistic. The purposeful organisation and the protection
from intolerant ignorance, which the royal house of Avis brought to the
explorers in Portugal, were a most important factor in putting that small
country at the head of the movement. But Portugal was not unique in
her possession of a royal house interested in the navigators and the
fabulous new world of which they spoke and wrote.

Against the background of the internal struggles of the western
monarchies for power and revenue, the fact that the kings readily turned
to organise the cosmopolitan genius for exploration of the period calls for
little remark. It was, in some sense, no more than one aspect of the general
patronage of the arts and sciences which was to be expected of a prince of
that day. But such patronage had a significance of its own. For it fitted
into the dominant mercantilist concepts and practices of the period.

In what has come to be called mercantilism may be seen, almost from

31 445 NCMH I

THE RENAISSANCE

the first emergence of trade as a matter of national concern (at the end of
the thirteenth century or thereabouts), a rising preoccupation with a
single purpose. It was the aim of each state to make itself economically
independent of potential enemies and doubtful friends. The single aim was
sought in a multiplicity of ways, varying from state to state and from
period to period. The manifestations of the policy may be seen in charters
and privileges, monopolies and protections, controls over exports and
imports, encouragements for shippers, and embargoes on luxuries. For
most countries an over-riding consideration was the accumulation of
bullion by means of a regulated balance of trade. The manifestations
fluctuate; the aim remains constant. In consequence ‘Mercantilism is so
broad and so loose a term that it seems to defy definition’. It is, as nearly
as it may be defined, ‘a term which may be applied to those theories,
policies, and practices, arising from the conditions of the time, by which the
national state, acting in the economic sphere, sought to increase its own
power, wealth, and prosperity’.

It was quite inevitable that events so revolutionary in their nature and
so pregnant with economic possibilities as the discoveries should deflect
the concepts and the practices of mercantilism into new patterns. The
underlying purpose, the achievement of an economically self-sufficient
and independent kingdom, had to be attained by revised arrangements in
a new and wider world, a world too in which so much actual and potential
wealth had been revealed as to alter all of the old balances.

Consequently the intensely nationalistic direction which had organised
the discoveries, and which controlled the results of those discoveries,
became by its very nature an international factor of the greatest weight.
This was in part the result of the somewhat fortuitous circumstance
that the early discoveries gave the wealth and power implicit in them to
the Roman Catholic powers of Spain and Portugal, and that by 1580 the
official title to enjoyment of both the Spanish and the Portuguese portions
of the discoveries had passed to the house of Habsburg. Since the national
and mercantilist ideals of all the other states of western Europe came to a
point in the desire to be free in religion, in policy, in finance, from the
power of Philip II, these aims became, in effect, desires to be free from
power and wealth conferred by overseas possessions.

In part, however, the reorientation of the European concepts of trade
and diplomacy was bound to be affected, whether the Habsburg domi-
nation were an element in the situation or not. If trade, shipping and
a sea-faring population, the control of the primary commodities for
manufacture, consumption and warfare, and the amassing of a hoard
of bullion, were the prime objects of statecraft (as they were), then the
revelation of new sources of all of these things was bound to stimulate
new ambitions and new rivalries. The exploitation of the newly-revealed
resources was bound to produce a new range of values, new balances

446

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

of wealth and power, even without the Habsburg dominance. Yet not
only the old political pattern but much of the old trade pattern remained
largely unaffected by the new trade routes, new sources of wealth and of
treasure.

Since it was the shrinkage of the Mediterranean trade system in the
fifteenth century which gave much of the impetus to the discoveries, it
may seem paradoxical to maintain that the Mediterranean and its sea-
borne trade still remained the most important single element in the active
commercial and maritime life of western Europe throughout the sixteenth
century. But, despite the disappearance of the great Italian galley-fleets
from northern ports, and the decline both of the shipping and of the
general power of Florence, Venice, Genoa, and the other Italian ports,
trade in general between the north and the Mediterranean increased
instead of decreasing in the sixteenth century. The spices and other
products of the Levant-overland contact with India and the Far East
were interrupted by the Turks and Arabs, and reappeared at the termini
of the new trade routes which the discoveries had opened up. But the
other products of the Mediterranean trade, the cottons, wines, raisins
and dates; the fine silks of Florence and the silks and glass of Venice;
the sugar, cotton, silk of Sicily and North Africa; the oil, olives, wine,
almonds and oranges of Iberia, the woad and wine of Toulouse, and the
iron from northern Spain; all of these things flowed in larger and swifter
streams. They provided some of the vital raw materials for manufactures;
they catered for a more middle-class standard of comfort; and they were
less conspicuously exotic and luxurious than the products of the eastern
trade which the Turk had interrupted.

There came a period when even these trades were at a standstill until
the battle of Lepanto reduced the menace of piracy. But for most of the
sixteenth century it is true that the trade of the Mediterranean was of
greater mercantile significance than that of the outer world, the Atlantic
and the Indian Oceans.

Nevertheless even these trades shifted in their emphasis on localities,
and that partly because of the reorientation which the discoveries brought
with them. Admirably as Portugal had organised and supported the
voyages to the Indian Ocean and to the Indian mainland, and so to the
Spice Islands and (by accident) to Brazil, that small kingdom had neither
the men, the experience nor the wisdom to regulate the settlement and
trade which followed from the discoveries. The great wealth of the East
Indian spice trade was hers, as long as conditions were maintained at a
level which would make interlopers unprofitable. But controls and
monopolies were almost inevitable in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
and although Turkish interruptions put an end to Mediterranean traffic
in 1512 and produced a European spice famine, this merely served to
accentuate the rivalry with which Portuguese East Indian trade was

447 31-3

THE RENAISSANCE

threatened. By the middle of the century restrictions and controls had
emphasised the vulnerability of this source of wealth.

In 1514 it had been established that for Portugal colonial trade was a
royal monopoly, and it was organised by royal factors on behalf of the
royal family ; the Vedores da Fazenda, set up in 1516, prepared the outward
cargoes, split up and sold the return cargoes of spices and silks, and
recruited troops and administrators. The chaos and overwork which
resulted were not cured when, under Spanish influence, the Vedores were
replaced by a Conselho da Fazenda. The East Indian trade was forced
through a small number of entrepot ports — Goa for the main spice trade
of the islands and the Indian mainland, Ormuz for Arabia and the Persian
Gulf, Macao for China, and Malacca for Sundas and the Moluccas —
and thence was sent for Europe in closely regulated shipments, strictly
limited in the number of ships and directed only to a single mart town.
Trade to the west coast of Africa and trade between the different colonial
areas was largely in the hands of licensed individual merchants (many
of them officials), and individuals could also engage in the main trade
from Goa to Lisbon on payment of heavy dues (about 30 per cent
ad valorem). But the unmistakable feature of the Portuguese development
of the trade placed within that country’s power was its authoritarian
but chaotic over-organisation.

Such restrictions invited the interloper, especially in view of the part
which trade played in diplomacy and the weak hold which the Portuguese
had on the outskirts of their supposed domains. Here the discrepancy
between means and ambitions was clear, and the weak hold of the
Portuguese, dependent to a large extent on early prestige and on a miscel-
lany of treaty rights agreed with local rulers, was not capable of with-
standing a European challenge.

The placing of the produce of the trade upon the European market was
organised (if that be the correct word) in such a manner as to accentuate
the inevitable tendency to both private and national rivalries for so rich
a source of wealth. Despite the failure to establish effective government
in her dependencies and to put into effect the plans of Almeida and
Albuquerque, Portugal enjoyed a brief period of intense prosperity in the
early years of the sixteenth century. It was a period marked by a flourishing
commerce and by the complete dominance of Lisbon in the colonial
trade. Originally the eastern produce had been ‘uttered’ through the
Portuguese factory at Antwerp from 1494 onwards. But from 1549 the
trade was directed to Lisbon, and from there it found its way to Antwerp
by ordinary commercial channels, running the gauntlet of the adminis-
trative interferences. The great bankers of the period, especially the
Fuggers, controlled the trade by the power which they wielded over the
revenue of the royal house of Portugal. The result was that the spices
were still marketed through Antwerp, but that administrative interference,

448

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

the intervention of the Vedores da Fazenda, the system of entrepots in
the East and the monopoly of Lisbon in the West, all added to the costs
which the merchant-bankers had to face before they began to enjoy the
trade. The selling-prices ultimately bore no relation to those which could
have been obtained under a more competitive system, or by non-
Portuguese interlopers.

The system invited challenge both by its weakness and by its wealth.
But it did nothing to bring to Portugal ability to defend its treasure.
For Portuguese public revenue the climax was reached when in the financial
crisis of 1569 Sebastian was unable to meet his bills and was forced to
suspend payment at Antwerp. The more general picture of the failure to
exploit is given by John Wheeler in his Treatise of Commerce at the end
of the century. ‘First, for the Portingall, we know, that like a good
simple man, he say led everie yeare full hungerly (God wot) about 3 parts
of the earth almost for spices, & when he had brought them home, the
great rich purses of the Antwerpians, subjects of the King of Spain,
ingrossed them all into their own hands, yea oftentimes gave money for
them before hand, making thereof a plaine Monopoly.’ Wheeler, as
secretary of the Merchant Adventurers of England, was not without
prejudice where Antwerp was concerned, but his picture of the way in
which the Portuguese spice trade served to enrich Antwerp and to give
to that city a dominance in European trade is not overdrawn.

The Spanish possessions in the New World differed from those belonging
to Portugal in that they required settlement rather than trade to produce
wealth. That, at least, was the first conclusion to which the Spaniards
came, and Columbus on his third voyage set out the conditions of coloni-
sation. But the agricultural produce which was the first fruit of Spanish
colonisation was of little value in a Europe which was itself predominantly
agricultural. It was not until the rapid penetration of the conquistadores
revealed the great mineral wealth at Spain’s disposal that the Spanish
possessions became anything like as important in the European economy
as were those of Portugal.

Ferdinand and Isabella rehabilitated their impoverished domains,
fought their wars and reconstituted royal authority, by means of absorbing
the grand masterships of the great military orders, by restrictions on the
privileges and revenues of the nobles, by harmony with the urban elements
of the Hermandad, taxation of the clergy, taxation through the cortes of
Castile, and the alcabala. The period of the Catholic monarchs was one
of magnificent achievement, but it was not a period from which the
monarchy emerged solvent even though the system of finance in Castile
was more advanced than in any other European country, and Isabella
had achieved serious retrenchment. The queen was forced to pawn her
jewels to raise loans for the war against the Moors in 1489 and, though in
her last will she ordered that the unallocated revenues of her kingdom

449

THE RENAISSANCE

should be used for debt redemption, this was not carried out and Spain
came into the sixteenth century as a monarchy whose resources were
deeply pledged and whose revenues could ill support the drain which
any attempt to govern effectively, let alone to play a leading role in Europe,
would entail.

Revenue was largely derived from the kingdom of Castile. In Aragon
and its dependencies the. cortes were so troublesome that they were
seldom summoned, and they contributed little by way of taxation.
Revenue from the New World played as yet no recognisable part either
in restoring royal authority in Spain or in increasing the power of Spain
in Europe. Not until the 1520’s did the volume of imports of precious
metals from the New World reach and sustain a flow which made it a
serious factor in the economic and political situation of Spain and of
Europe. Significant quantities of gold had begun to arrive by the start
of the century. The amount of the period 1503-5 was almost doubled by
the period 1511-15, but the epoch-making increases did not begin until
the 1560 period. Then the increase was more largely in silver than in gold,
although gold imports also rose very considerably. By 1516 the revenue
derived from his overseas possessions brought to Charles V about

35.000 ducats a year. Rapid short-term fluctuations (to 122,000 ducats
in 1518 and down to a mere 6000 in 1521) make it advisable to allow
more weight to long-term trends than to the figures for any particular
year, or even for a period of five years. For the ten-year periods from
1538 to 1548 and from 1548 to 1558 the average yearly revenue was about

165.000 ducats, a vast increase on the 35,000 with which Charles V had
started his reign. Even this figure was soon to be passed as the great silver
mines were broughtintoproduction. Royal revenue derived from this source
increased rapidly to over a million ducats a year, and for most of the reign
of Philip II it gradually increased to between two and three millions a year.

These were revenues which exceeded those which the Habsburgs drew
from their possessions in the Low Countries. But they were only a small
proportion of the wealth derived from the New World. The royal quinto,
the fifth part of the metallic production, was often modified and at times
remitted. It paid for the cost of an increasingly elaborate administrative
system in Spanish America, and it paid also for the administration of the
Spanish West Indian islands. Even when the quinto was swelled by other
sources of revenue — by customs duties, sales of offices, salt, tobacco and
other monopolies, tithes and other semi-ecclesiastical dues, the alcabala
levied in the colonies, benevolences and even outright confiscations —
the revenues were still often largely absorbed by the costs of adminis-
tration. It was reckoned that about 50 per cent of the revenue was
absorbed in this way in the fifteenth century, that towards the close of
the seventeenth century about 80 per cent was so taken up; and there
are years in which no revenue was remitted even from the most productive

450

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

areas because it had been completely absorbed by the salaries of the
viceroys and other officials.

When the amount of the revenue received in Spain has been swollen
by all exactions and by the determined manner in which the mercantilist
administrators extracted the bullion from the colonies and tried to keep
it in Spain, and when it has been diminished by the smuggling, the piracy
and the peculation to which such a trade was inevitably subject, it remains
clear that Spain in the sixteenth century was receiving such quantities
of bullion as to upset the balances of Europe. This was a factor in the
diplomatic machinations of the period which gathered weight during the
second half of the sixteenth century and which at times predominated in
the seventeenth. When Charles was elected king of the Romans in 1519
it was the support of the Fuggers which enabled him to buy votes.
There was only too much justification for Jakob Fugger’s reminder that
‘It is well known that Your Imperial Majesty could not have gained the
Roman Crown save with mine aid ’. The loan which the Fuggers then made
was secured against the revenues of Tirol and of Spain, and it was
upon the revenues of the great ecclesiastical orders of knighthood in
Spain that the Fuggers had based their main business with the Habsburgs
for more than a century. By contrast, as the financial crisis of the
Schmalkaldic War loomed up in 155 1-2, the Fuggers, who were already
too deeply committed and who could not extract revenue from Spain or
the Netherlands, began to turn to the gold and silver expected from
‘India’ as the only acceptable security for reluctant loans. When Anton
Fugger stepped in and made a loan to the emperor at Villach in 1552,
the last time when the Fuggers held the emperor’s fate in their hands,
the loan of 400,000 ducats which saved Charles from accepting the harsh
terms put to him at Passau was secured entirely on Spain. Anton Fugger
was in this partly inspired by loyalty to the house of Habsburg; but partly
by the fact that the shipments of New World bullion to Spain were by
this time getting into spate and that it had just proved possible to get
large cargoes of American silver from Spain to Antwerp. The transference
of such bullion from Spain to the financial centre of Antwerp was an
essential part of the manoeuvre, and the stoppage of this trade by Philip II
entailed enormous losses for the bankers.

The extent to which the war-like capacity of the Habsburgs was based
on credit advanced by great bankers against the European revenues of
the house, or on actual bullion brought into Europe from the overseas
territories, is impossible to estimate, for the confusion of the accountancy
system adds to the difficulties. Certainly it is possible on important
occasions to demonstrate that without the lure of New World bullion the
credit-basis of Habsburg war-finance would have been infinitely less elastic.

The royal house, however,' even when it raided the trade of ordinary
merchants, normally touched only a small portion of the total trade to the

451

THE RENAISSANCE

New World. In addition to that brought in as royal revenue the flow of
bullion through the ordinary channels of commerce was enough to produce
the purely economic results which could not well be avoided in such a period.
Here the facts and the theories become intermingled. The sheer quantity
of new bullion must in itself have produced great and lasting changes in
society. On the other hand, the royal houses of Europe were all concerned
to profit, if possible, by manipulations of the coinage, and the period is one
of general but uneven debasement. Such machinations caused suspicions
and inequalities in merchant practice and make any assessment of prices
and price-trends doubly difficult, whilst the increased use of merchants’
bills enhanced the amount of currency or pseudo-currency in circulation to
an extent which exaggerated the consequences of the increase of bullion.

The first impact of the bullion was on Spain itself. There the imports of
treasure have been tabulated (Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the
Price Revolution in Spain, p. 34) in five-year periods, in pesos equal to
42-29 grams of pure silver.

1503-5

371055-3

I 55 I -5

986553 ro

1506-10

816236-5

1556-60

79989985

1511-15

1 195553-5

1561-5

1 1 207535 5

1516-20

9931965

1566-50

14141215-5

152 1-5

134170-0

1 571-5

119066090

1526-30

1038437-0

1576-80

17251941-0

I 53 I -5

165023 1 0

1581-5

293746120

1536-40

39378920

1586-90

23832630-5

1 541-5

4954005-0

1 59 i -5

35184862-5

1546-50

5508711-0

1596-1600

34428500-5

The decade 1590-1600 was the peak until the middle years of the eighteenth
century ; although actual production of silver increased in the New World
during the seventeenth century, it did not rise enough to overtake the
increasing costs of administration, and imports into Spain showed a steady
decline. Such an increase in bullion over a century as is indicated by
these figures had two major results. In Spain itself, and spreading from
Spain to the rest of Europe through the ordinary channels of commerce
and finance, it affected the relation of bullion and coin in circulation to
other goods, and so produced a price-rise. Outside of Spain it produced
a policy of jealous emulation, to make the possession of some share in
this bullion a necessary part of the policy of any power which would
aspire to independence of Spain or to rivalry with her.

The normal economic effects of the flow of bullion were complicated by
the fact that from 1519 onwards silver began to play a more important
part, and completely outweighed the imports of gold during the latter
half of the century. The result was that the comparatively stable relations
of the two metals were upset, and the problems of adjusting bi-metallic

452

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

currencies to a far more rapid and voluminous flow of the two metals
were added to the difficulties of the statesmen and financiers of the age.

Since the statesmen were, on the whole, slow to appreciate that the
troubles arose in large part from the sheer increase in the amount of
bullion in circulation, and since they all, at various times, attempted to
solve their local problems by adjustments of the mint standards (often
on a provincial rather than on a national basis), the price-rise of the period
is beset with subsidiary causes, with expedients which accentuated its
influence, and with a wide but confusing spate of theorising. Such factors
make the absolute influence of New World treasure difficult to estimate.
Yet it is quite clear that the period from about 1550 to about 1600 was
the period in which Spain had to adjust her economy, if possible, to the
new flow of bullion after the less remarkable shipments of the first half
of the century had started the processes. There, in Spain, prices began to
move upwards in the years around 1519-20 and continued steadily
upwards for the rest of the century, to finish five times as high as they had
been at the start of the century.

From Spain the movement flowed outwards and reached its climax in
western Europe towards the end of the century, but never affected prices
so disastrously as those of Spain. In France by the end of the century
the peak figures were only about two-and-a-half times those at the start;
in England the movement started perhaps a little later than in France
(about 1550) and did not reach a climax until the middle of the seventeenth
century, when prices ruled at a level which was more than three times
that at the start of the sixteenth century. Holland in her turn felt the
influence and was forced to attempt a remedy of the consequences of
the New World treasure. Charles V had decreed that all traffic with his
possessions overseas should flow through Seville, so that although the
Netherlands were under Habsburg rule they participated in the treasure
only as a result of normal commercial intercourse, on much the same
terms as did France or England. But Antwerp’s importance had been
vastly enhanced by the increased traffic in spices which had followed after
the Portuguese discoveries and she was the undoubted centre of the financial
world of the sixteenth century. There the great bankers had their principal
houses ; there the conditions of the loans which dominated the diplomacy
of the period were laid down. It was by shipments of specie from Spain
that the Habsburg credit at Antwerp was maintained, and the intense
commercial activity of that city inevitably enhanced the natural results of
the bullion shipped there. The high point of the commercial predominance
of Antwerp was about the middle years of the century, and by that time
the general level of prices there was higher than in France or England. The
contemporary description of Guicciardini puts the cost of house-room at
Antwerp higher than anywhere else in Europe except in Lisbon, and English
representatives found the cost of living there twice as dear as in France.

453

THE RENAISSANCE

Suffering though she was (according to modem diagnosis) from a
surfeit of precious metals, Spain strove strenuously to keep them from
being exported. This has been denied, but there can be no serious doubt
that Spanish policy was mercantilist in its broadest sense, in that commerce
was used as a means of bringing political and diplomatic pressure to bear
on other states; and it was mercantilist in its narrower, bullionist, sense
in that strict measures were enacted to secure the accumulation within
that country of as large a hoard of bullion as possible. The normal trade
with the Spanish colonies was reserved to Spain and the export of gold and
silver to foreign countries was forbidden. Such measures proved not
only useless but disastrous; they enhanced in Spain the dearth of goods
in relation to bullion which was the chief result of the bullion shipments.
Thus by the middle of the sixteenth century the rise of prices in Spain was
ascribed in part to the export of goods to the colonies; the remedy was
to forbid exports of Spanish goods since the colonies had enough raw
materials to satisfy their own needs. So trade and industry in Spain
suffered a loss of markets, her economy rapidly became unable to answer
even her own requirements, and more and more Spain came to be depen-
dent on a trade system in which she bought her requirements from the
rest of Europe, and paid the bulk of the purchase price in New World
treasure. The practices which applied to Spain herself applied even more
to the New World possessions, where the ban on trade with aliens was
evaded in many ways, often by the intervention of a Spaniard to ‘colour’
the goods as though they were his own. Ships from the Hanseatic cities
brought to Seville textiles and other goods from the Baltic and from Eng-
land, and as the pattern of seventeenth-century trade developed, French
vessels came to dominate the Seville-New World market, closely followed
by the Genoese and the Dutch. By 1691 it was estimated that each year
the French traded about twenty million /ivres-worth of goods to Seville,
of which about twelve million went to the New World. Of the return
cargoes the French took about fourteen millions, the Dutch share was
about ten millions and the English about six or seven millions.

So, despite the policy pursued, the Spanish government was unable to
contain within that country either the good or the evil results of the new
flow of treasure. Both the sheer bulk of treasure and the changes in the
relative supplies of gold and silver had their reactions outside of Spain.
From the Spanish point of view this meant that the picture of the outcome
of the Portuguese spice monopoly was now repeated. Whereas the
Portuguese had toiled ‘full hungerly’ about three parts of the world in
order to bring home spices to enrich the great rich purses of the Antwerpers,
the Spaniard now felt that ‘All that the Spaniards bring from the Indies,
acquired after long, prolix and hazardous navigations, and all that they
harvest with blood and labour, foreigners carry off to their homelands
with ease and comfort

454

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

The results of such an expansion of the effects of the treasure were by
no means entirely bad. But they were disruptive. Thereon has been
built one of the strongest arguments for the thesis of the ‘profit inflation’
in European economic history. It is the mark of a ‘profit inflation’ that
prices are running away from costs of production, so that the class which
organises and lives by the sale of goods (the entrepreneur) reaps the
profit and there is, according to the length and depth of the inflationary
movement, a change in the balance of society in which the entrepreneurs
become more wealthy and powerful at the expense of the landowners on
the one hand and of the wage-earners and producers on the other hand.
Circumstances in Spain led to the new purchasing power going in the first
instance to the aristocratic and ruling classes, so that they bid up wages
and created in that country an ‘income inflation’ rather than a ‘profit
inflation’. The new bullion reached the other countries of western Europe,
however, by the avenues of trade and finance, and there the merchants
selling to the treasure-glutted Spanish market made the enormous profits
which are the hall-mark of the economic history of the period. There the
great fruits of the economic progress of the period accrued to the profiteer
rather than to the wage-earner or the landowner. The ‘profit inflation’ is
held to have lasted in England from 1550 to 1650, and in France from
1530 to 1700, with wages in England and France declining in purchasing
power as the period wore on.

This result of the spread of the New World bullion not only produced
a noteworthy change in the balance of society. It also produced a rapid
and stimulating growth of capital and a corresponding spirit of enterprise
in the merchant and manufacturing elements in the western states. Not
least among the manifestations of this spirit was the widespread growth
of new industrial techniques and of new methods of financing them. This
is the age of the so-called ‘ Industrial Revolution of the sixteenth century
and there can be no reasonable doubt that the new bullion played its part
in inspiring and in financing the technical improvements, the enlargements
of the unit of production and the marketing expansions of the age. There
was an ‘atmosphere of buoyancy, exhilaration and freedom from eco-
nomic cares’ which led to crisis and to hardships, but which was also a
requisite for the economic and the cultural vivacity of the sixteenth century.

The nationalist reactions to the Habsburg possession of the sources
of the new bullion fitted in well with this spirit, and much of the anti-
Habsburg nationalism of the period has no other theme than that of
disputing the wealth of the New World with the Spaniards. It was a theme
made more urgent by the accession of Philip to the throne of Portugal
in addition to that of Spain, in 1 580. Thus both portions of the New World
(as divided between Spain and Portugal by the bull Inter Caetera in 1493,
or subsequently and more effectively by the Treaty of Tordesillas) came
into the possession of the same threateningly predominant Power.

455

THE RENAISSANCE

Western Europe felt, as the younger Hakluyt wrote, that the threat of
‘the peril that may ensue to all Princes of Europe if the King of Spain be
suffered to enjoy Portugalle with the East Indies is soche as is not on
sodden to be set down’.

The Spanish economy was such that, in any case, she was forced to
rely on the rest of Europe for manufactures both for herself and for her
colonies, and so to allow her treasure to find its way to the markets of
Europe. Her predicament was enhanced by two serious defects which
were natural and geographical, not the result of her own mercantile
system. These were her lack of naval stores and her lack of West African
possessions. Burghley was convinced in the Armada year that Spain,
without masts, boards, cables, cordage, pitch, tar and copper from the
‘ Eastlands ’ (the Baltic), could not transport the smallest army of invasion.
Therein lay a grave weakness, which made it essential that Spain should
stand in good credit in Antwerp, the seat of the Baltic trade, and which
laid her open to raids such as crippled her when sixty Hansard ships were
captured at the mouth of the Tagus. This lack of naval stores was a
general problem in the Age of Mercantilism, one from which England
suffered as much as Spain, and which made the Baltic States and the
merchants who dominated their trade unduly important in the diplomacy
of the period. More peculiar was the dependence of the Spanish empire
on extra-Spanish trade for slave labour.

Christopher Columbus as the first coloniser had brought, on his third
voyage to the West Indies, a strange mixture of would-be settlers. Despite
the close scrutiny of the Casa da Contratacion at Seville, many undesirables
accompanied him and still more followed him. Emigration as a means
of solving the problems of the European economy was both unnecessary
and undesirable in terms of the problems set by the sixteenth-century
statesmen. Spain, for example, had a population of only about eight
millions at the end of the century, France of perhaps sixteen millions,
England about five millions ; Portugal had only about a million, and the
Netherlands less than three millions. These figures were indeed tending
to mount in the course of the century, especially in the denser centres of
population — in the cities from which most of the exiguous statistical
material derives. It is difficult to ascertain from actual evidence whether
the sixteenth century was a period of increase or decrease in population
in western Europe. On the whole it was probably a period of increase,
but not of such increase as to make the peopling of the newly-discovered
empty spaces of the world by Europeans either desirable or possible.
Any such movement towards large-scale emigration would in any case
have been clean contrary to one of the major tenets of the statesmen of
the period ; for next after bullion sturdy infantry soldiers were the main
defence of a country, unless it happened to be an island, in which case
seamen were the objects of attention.

456

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

Neither in fact nor in theory, therefore, could the peopling of the
New World be accomplished by the Old World. There arose a conflict
of purpose between a desire to send out only suitable colonists and an
acceptance of the colonists who offered. In fact numbers were small,
women emigrants were scarce and generally unprincipled, and men were
anxious to make fortunes and return to spend them rather than to make
homesteads and enjoy them. From the start the Spaniards had recourse
to native labour. The Indians of New Spain could be got to work so
cheaply that poor young men from Old Spain could not get work, ‘For
the Indian will live all the week with less than one groat, which the Spaniard
cannot do, nor any man else’. Even if working men could have been
provided in adequate numbers, competition with Indian labour on a wage
basis, still more competition on a basis of forced labour or of slavery,
made emigration unattractive save for those who did not propose to
engage in heavy labour.

The exhaustion of the Carib and Indian labour and the recourse to
negro slave labour had been a constant preoccupation of the Spanish
authorities from the start. The first shipment of negro slaves was made
in 1503 and was followed by a constant traffic. Until 1515 they were
bought from the Portuguese at Lisbon; then they were shipped direct
from the Guinea Coast, and from 1517 onwards the trade was worked
under a system of permits, or asientos, allowing alien merchants to supply
this defect in the Spanish imperial economy. The asiento, however, merely
gave a monopoly of this vital trade to the concessionaire; it did not
supply labour in the quantity or at a price to satisfy the colonist. So a slave
trade in despite of authority developed, which was certainly a smuggled
trade and was at all times little distinguished from piracy.

The most celebrated incidents in the early years of this trade are the three
voyages of John Hawkins of Plymouth. His first voyage, of 1562, left
him the wealthiest man in Plymouth, his second voyage of 1564 left him
the wealthiest man in England, and his third voyage of 1567 led to the
fight at St Juan d’Ulloa and to the intensification of the privateering
raids on Spanish commerce which developed into open naval warfare
between England and Spain.

Hawkins’s ventures are outstanding, but they are not unique. The
underlying factors were that Spain could not supply her colonists with
goods or with labour ; neither could she create such a barrier of sea-power
and administrative efficiency as to exclude other Powers from the domi-
nions which she claimed. There was a reputable colony of English
merchants in Seville and other Spanish ports whose business was to
trade to Spain the goods which the colonies required, for onward shipment
in the annual Spanish flotas\ there were many voyages to the Guinea
Coast made by both French and English merchants; and the Spanish
possessions and shipping in the Caribbean were the constant prey of

457

THE RENAISSANCE

French privateers, many of them Huguenots. Organised and fitted out
by the great armateur of Dieppe, Jean Ango, the French had throughout
intercepted the Spanish treasure. In particular the great Jean Fleury
early developed the plan of lurking off Cape St Vincent or the Azores
for the returning Spanish fleets; there in 1522-3 he intercepted the first
treasures sent by Cortes from the conquest of Mexico, and thence the
French derived a series of charts by use of which they preyed increasingly
on Spanish trade to the New World. Hawkins hoped at one stage to
profit from these French depredations, half a century old and still in
constant practice by this time, by selling protection to the Spaniards in
return for trading privileges. The negotiation came to nothing, and the
wealth of the Indies, in this instance as in so many others, merely added
to the many causes which were setting the Powers of Europe at logger-
heads during the sixteenth century.

Thence arose deep disputes on problems of international law. For
French and English and Dutch in their turn, as they claimed a right to
trade across the seas and a right to explore where Spaniards and Portu-
guese had not yet penetrated, were all compelled to put forth a doctrine
which, whatever the form of words used, challenged the right of the
Habsburgs and the competence of the Papacy. The denial came to much
the same concept of freedom of trade and navigation, whatever the nation
which uttered it. For the English the classic exposition (out of many which
were put forth) came in a protest that the English were excluded from
commerce with the West Indies contra jus gentium. The papal title to
possession was not accepted; the use of the air and of the sea was claimed
as common to all mankind, and the Spaniards were told that ‘ Prescription
without possession availeth nothing’ — their claims would only be
accepted where they were re-enforced by effective occupation. The French,
in similar terms, protested that ‘In lands which the King of Spain did
not possess they ought not to be disturbed, nor in their navigation of the
seas, nor would they consent to be deprived of the sea or the sky ’.

These were profound challenges, based on legal doctrine. The effective
motive in the matter was the wealth of the Indies and the challenge
presented to merchants, explorers, governments and patriots by the
exclusive claims and the inefficient administration of the Spaniards. Too
much, however, can easily be made of the inefficiency of Spanish colonial
administration, for in face of the difficulties of travel, the novelty of the
problems, the lack of trained staff and the inroads of opponents, they
made a most notable contribution to the art of colonial government and
retained an outstanding proportion of the profits of empire. It was the
administration of metropolitan Spain, rather than of the colonial empire,
which provoked the challenge, by its attempts to preserve the bullion
imports within a Spain which could not supply the colonists with their
wants. Such a policy could not be maintained in the face of competition

458

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

from other states which commanded the resources to supply the demand
and the sea-power to deny the prohibitions. Two considerations bring
out this incompatibility; by the second half of the sixteenth century the
high prices, high wages and general attractions found in Spain drew
regular trains of Frenchmen across the Pyrenees to earn some capital
from the treasures of the Indies. These ‘fleas living on Spain’ were not
only French, though it was estimated that there were ten thousand French
workmen in the kingdom of Valencia alone in 1 548 ; Italians and other
peoples shared in the immigration despite the fears of depopulation
and the difficulties conjured up by their own governments, and contem-
porary accounts describe a Spain in which it would be hard to find
artisans if strangers were not admitted. The evidence is not statistically
accurate, but it leaves a clear impression that Spain herself offered terms of
employment which attracted aliens and allowed them to drain her treasure.
The new treasure had created a labour market in Spain which neither
her own nor her rivals’ legislation could confine within her boundaries.

A second factor to be borne in mind in considering the Spanish position
as the monopolist of the new treasure is that at the time of Hawkins’s
second voyage, in 1565, Elizabeth of England was by no means firmly
opposed to Spain. The serious threats to her position at that time came
rather from France and Mary Queen of Scots, with French support, than
from Spain — so much so that one of the terms which Philip had imposed
on France at Cateau Cambresis had been an acknowledgment of Elizabeth’s
right to the English throne. Yet Elizabeth allowed herself to share in
Hawkins’s outfit and in the profits of the venture; and until the Spanish
attitude hardened in the succeeding years there was great hope that
Hawkins might be held to have given merely an encouraging exhibition
of the way in which English shipping and merchant competence could
supplement and take a place within the Spanish concept of empire.
Behind Hawkins’s ventures lay a considerable body of diplomatic inter-
changes, from which it might have emerged that Spain would grant an
asiento to the English to trade in return for facility to use English shipping
to defend Spanish lands and trade against French and Moorish privateers.

These are but two outstanding aspects of the general lack of balance
and of feasibility in the Spanish concepts. The incompatibility of ambitions
and achievements was a common feature of Spanish imperialism, as of
Portuguese; enough in itself, by its economic working, to have roused the
desires of the rest of the world. When, however, such incompatibility
was coupled with a severely nationalistic application of mercantilist con-
cepts, with the attempt by Spain, not only to retain the treasure as a source
of power but also to manoeuvre her wider trade policy, with treasure at
its centre, so as to gain dominance over the economic life and general
policy of her neighbours, then the temptations to interrupt the flow of
treasure gained momentum. Examples could easily be multiplied of the

459

THE RENAISSANCE

way in which trade policy was envisaged by Spain as a means of bringing
pressure to bear on her neighbours. Exclusive possession of the newly-
discovered outer world was easily taken for granted, as when Philip, not
as yet himself directly concerned, nevertheless gave his opinion that English
trade to the Guinea Coast should not be permitted in 1555, that being
a region plainly known to be in the occupation of the king of Portugal
‘so as the sayed navigation might not bee maynteyned withoute soch
notable inconvenyence as wer not expedyent to bee adventured’. From
feelings of exclusive possession, inexpediency and possible trouble,
Spanish policy ranged to definite and purposeful intervention, as when
for political reasons com was forbidden to be exported to England in the
shortage of 1555, or when in 1562 the new Spanish ambassador to London
received his instructions. Elizabeth’s poverty was to be fostered with all
care; thus she would be forced to grant concessions in the Anglo-Flemish
trade in order to get the customs revenue which could only be obtained
when that trade was flourishing; and thus, being kept dependent on
Spanish goodwill for the bulk of her revenue, she might be compelled
to alter the religious establishment of her country.

The outward spread of the new bullion, the impact of the new range of
prices, and the revision of the ratios of gold and of silver, all combined
to make government finance even more difficult than formerly in all the
countries trading with Spain and the Netherlands (which meant the whole
of western Europe) and so to make the governments even more susceptible
to the kind of economic pressures which Spain tried to exercise. The
Netherlands were the centre of the financial world; there, at Antwerp,
the emperor, the kings and queens of France and of England and the
multitude of German princes, all raised the loans on which they depended
for the internal stability and the external independence of their regimes.
They could not conceivably ignore or overlook the financial conditions
and concepts which dominated the money-marts of the Netherlands, and
they were almost forced to work out some sort of thesis which would
enable them to understand their contacts with this trade and to regulate
those contacts in their own interests. Denied direct access to the new
bullion at its source by the claims, and to some extent by the practices,
of Spain, they turned with vigour to denials of the claims, to evasions of
the rules, and to regulations of their own trades so as to mulct the
Spaniard at the last.

This is the period in which both France and England are preoccupied
with theories and precepts for regulating coinage, for manipulating rates
of foreign exchange, for encouraging exports and for discouraging imports.
There are, too, significant contributions to economic theory in attempts
to encourage ‘ invisible exports ’ in the shape of shipping, marine insurance
and banking. But the chief result of the situation was a deep study of the
problems of coinage, and an emphatic reiteration of the already accepted

460

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

concept of the balance of trade as a means of drawing the required
bullion from one country to another. The best known, but by no means
isolated, feature of these movements is the proposition of a ‘Quantity
theory’ of the results of the new bullion by Jean Bodin. ‘Je trouve que
la charte que nous voyons vient pour trois causes. La principale et
presque seule (que personne jusques icy n’a touchee) est l’abondance d’or
et d’argent, qui est aujourd’huy en ce royaume plus grande qu’elle n’a este
il y a quatre cens ans’, wrote Bodin in 1568 in his Response au Paradoxe
du Sieur de Malestroit — a paradox in which debasement of the coinage
was put forward as the cause of the rise of prices. Almost equally well-
known, but not so easily to be understood (for the events were shrouded
in some of the mysteries of diplomacy, many of the confusions of economic
theory, and much personal vain-glory) were Thomas Gresham’s efforts
to gain for Queen Elizabeth a share of the treasure which she needed.

Gresham’s career as the ‘eminence grise des finances anglaises’ can
be taken as exemplifying the way in which the affairs of the whole of
western Europe, and of Elizabethan England in particular, turned on the
current of New World bullion, via Seville and Antwerp, by the middle of
the sixteenth century. Of the outstanding events in his career, which key
up this picture, the chief is his voyage to Seville in 1554, in search of
bullion. He had been sent to Antwerp in 1552 to negotiate substantial
loans from the Fuggers. He was successful, and the loans were repaid
within a year, after which the needs of the emperor absorbed all the
Fuggers’ capacity, and in 1554 Gresham was glad to accept a loan from
the Fuggers and from some Genoese, the money to be collected in Spain.
Here may be seen the manner in which even England shared in the bullion
flow by means of loans on the Antwerp bourse ; and the limitations im-
posed by Spain and the precarious balance of the Spanish economy. For
Gresham in Spain so used the rates of exchange and so upset the credit of
the Spanish bankers, that the banks at Seville had to suspend payments and
he was at one time afraid that he had precipitated a general financial crisis.

The second typical event in the career of Gresham came when, in 1565,
he set to work to manipulate the rates of exchange, the comparative
soundness of English coinage, and the deserved reputation which he had
gained for strict business probity, in order to secure loans for Elizabeth
on better terms than could be got by other monarchs. For this purpose
he used the technique of mobilising the overseas credits of English
merchants in order to pay off outstanding loans without setting the rates
of exchange against himself, and his manoeuvre was accompanied by a
compensating grant of favour to those English merchants. This was the
time at which the age-old privileges of the Hansard merchants in England
were overridden, to the advantage of the Merchant Adventurers. There
was in all of this an unmistakable emphasis on the economic unity of the
State of England, the subordination of individual interests to those of the

33 46l KCUK I

THE RENAISSANCE

State — and the reluctant dependence of that State on the markets, the
credit and the bullion, of the Netherlands.

England, as the other countries of western Europe, found it essential to
share in the wealth of the New World, and found the Antwerp marts a
satisfactory way of so doing. It was a way supplemented by interloping
voyages to the Spanish Main, by direct trade with Spain, and by indirect
relations between the participants, each of whom attempted to keep as
large a share of the bullion as possible, but each of whom was forced on
occasions to allow remittances which transferred the bullion from one to
the other. In effect mutual toleration ruled between Spain and her oppo-
nents to such an extent that both sides accepted the Netherlands as ‘the
Indies of England’ and wrote of Spanish coin as the best circulating
medium of France. With such close financial and trading links serving
the purpose of bringing the Spanish bullion to the other countries of the
West, the regulations by which each such country tried to secure, and to
retain, a portion of the specie took on a new and urgent importance.

Such a system was peculiarly open to political influences, and the
overriding religious purposes of Spanish policy in the Netherlands in the
end broke down the system by ending the religious tolerance on which it
had been based. Overmuch can be made of the advent of the duke of
Alba in the Netherlands in this connection. For Cardinal Granvelle had
fomented religious disputes there since his appointment in 1561, and had
worked there with great effect for an intolerant religio-economic regime
which would exclude heretics from trade and from the marts, and so
would reduce heretic princes to conformity. The success with which he
had managed to exclude English cloths from trade, on the pretext of plague
in London, was plainly attributed to ‘Spaniards and priests’, amongst
whom the ‘first worker’ was without doubt the cardinal, ‘whom ys hattid
of all men’. Alba, however, certainly perpetuated the policy of Granvelle,
though there were occasions on which he showed himself less bigoted and
more of an economist than the cardinal. It was with Alba’s appointment
that Gresham decided that English traders and financiers ought to quit
the Netherlands, where men were so ready ‘one to cut another’s throat
for matters of religion’. He himself left Antwerp in 1568. The mart of
the Staple Company migrated to England after a series of unsatisfactory
expedients in an attempt to find an alternative to Bruges. And the cloth
mart of the Merchant Adventurers was at that time transferred from
Antwerp to Hamburg, thereby removing from the Netherlands one of the
key trades of sixteenth-century Europe and at the same time detaching
the great and rising city of Hamburg from its allegiance to the Hanse
League. Such changes inaugurate a new epoch in the trade pattern of
Europe, quite apart from their peculiar importance in the economic
history of England, where the export trade in wool never recovered from
its divorce from the manufacturers of the Netherlands and where the

462

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

already booming trade in the export of woollen cloths was confirmed in
its dominant position by these changes. More important, probably, than
the technically economic results of the changes were the political and
diplomatic adjustments which they entailed.

Such an interruption led to a newly nationalistic organisation of the
English economy, an organisation in which piracy in the Channel played
an increasingly important part, giving to England that share of the
treasure which she could not now get by loans and by trade in the Low
Countries. The former type of piracy, nearly allied to trade, the ‘piraterie
a Faimable, commerce interlope plutot ’ of the early English voyages to
the West Indies, gave way to the endless English robberies which
provoked Councillor Viglius, after Granvelle left the Netherlands, to his
heartfelt complaint ‘O Lord God, we live in peace, but we sustain more

damage than we should do if we had open war The pilleries do

continue still. There is no justice executed.’ In 1568 a major diplomatic
incident was touched off when Elizabeth decreed the arrest of a shipment
of Genoese bullion, en route from Spain, destined to succour Alba’s
troops. The ships had sought refuge at Plymouth, and there Elizabeth
took the treasure into ‘ protective custody ’, after which there was virtually
open war at sea and the treasure route from Spain to the Netherlands
could only be used by large and well-armed flotas, such as the Medina Celi
fleet of 1572 or the larger and ineffective flota of the following year.
English pirates were astride the route by which Spanish New World
treasure reached the entrepots of the Netherlands.

English intervention in the route by which the Netherlands ‘uttered’
the New World bullion was to be of vital significance to England’s
economy and to her diplomacy. It was to lead to that speculative mania
which marked the Elizabethan period and which gave the background
to the social and educational changes of the time. It was to divert much
enterprise from more normal and possibly more productive commercial
and agricultural pursuits; and it was to lead to a forthright challenge to
Habsburg power in the Narrow Seas which, being settled, opened a new
era in European history.

In these developments England was alone only because of the facts of
her geographical situation. France and Portugal were alternative treasure-
routes between Spain and the trade-centres of western Europe. Much
went by bills of exchange and other means, and it must be accepted that
the harrying of the Channel route certainly did not bar the transport of
bullion by that means ; but it did make it more perilous, more expensive,
and less reliable.

Perhaps more important is the fact that it coincided, within a few years,
with the dominance of Spain over Portugal, and the control of the spice-
trade by Philip II. Hitherto the new overseas routes to the spices of the
East had created crises in the spice-trade of the world, and had at times

463 32-2

THE RENAISSANCE

given to Portugal and to Antwerp a financial predominance which
Antwerp exploited and which Portugal abused. The new conditions had
never ended the older Mediterranean routes to the spices, however.
Now, from 1580 onwards, the king of Spain was in control, at a time
when relaxations in the monopoly of the Portuguese trade had combined
with an Arab revival to give to Portugal once more a predominance which
that country had earlier allowed to slip after the brief spurt of the first
quarter of the century. This newly-predominant trade Philip purposefully
directed away from the Channel, away from the English pirates and from
the Netherlands merchants, and into the Mediterranean. In 1585, for
example, he offered the contract for the Portuguese pepper trade to
Venice, then to Milan, Genoa and Florence. That these cities decided
not to accept the terms is evidence of their belief in the continued vitality
of the Mediterranean trade to the Levant, as they knew it. Philip’s policy
in this instance failed, partly from suspicion of the Habsburgs. But it
represented a long-term change in the weight of economic balance. Now,
at last, may be seen that shift in the balance which the new trade-routes
had not brought in their first flush. Now, in the last decade of the
sixteenth century, not at any earlier date, may be seen the decline of the
Mediterranean before the Atlantic — despite the fact that the defeat of
the Armada and the consequent dominance in the Channel of the English
and their satellites made pepper of Levantine origin cheaper in Europe
than pepper of Portuguese origin in the immediately subsequent years.

It was, therefore, in the last generation of the sixteenth century that
the impact of the New World upon Europe began to assume serious
proportions and to produce lasting and fundamental changes in the
balance of European interests. The gathering momentum of the changes,
against the constant factor of Habsburg predominance, led to a re-
phrasing of the anti-Habsburg mercantilist doctrines of the opposition
countries. The first result was in a desire to alienate the Portuguese
possessions from Philip. English thought fell naturally into grooves which
led to the fostering of rebellion in Portugal. Thus Spain would be deprived
of the treasure of the West, of her trades and merchandise, of her mariners,
of victuals too. Thus, by breaking the Spanish domination and claiming
a share of Portuguese trade (a share ultimately confirmed by the marriage
of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza) ‘may we retayne the grete
masse of tresure that workes the grete effects of the worlde’. So wrote
the younger Hakluyt in 1580. He was but putting into phrases the
commonplace sentiments of his contemporaries.

The concept of the ‘Balance of Trade’ was by this time generally
accepted. Disputes were not over the reality of the problem, but over the
details of the means by which the desired result, the increase of bullion
by a favourable balance, might be achieved. In England by 1575 an
able state paper had stated the concept, had defended it, and had even

464

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

struck the balance for that year. The ‘Somme of the inplussing in value
of the owtcarried above the inbrought commodities’ was £255,214. 135.

The ‘Balance’ became a strong argument (not only in England) for
persistent attempts to establish a new and ‘colonial’ trade system, in
which the overseas commodities should not be got from Spain, either
by direct trade or through the Netherlands, but by direct access to colonies
within the allegiance. The advantages, and the potential fruitfulness, of
overseas lands were cried up. The temperate parts of North America, in
particular, seemed to promise everything which could be desired, even
the timber and other naval stores for which the Baltic had hitherto been
the only source of supply. By settlement there, it was argued, England
could rid herself of dependency on Spain for oils, ‘sacks’, raisins, oranges,
lemons, skins; of dependency on France for woad, salt and wines, and
of dependency on the Baltic lands for flax, pitch, masts and tar, ‘and so
shoulde we not so exhaust our treasure, and so exceedingly enriche our
doubtfull friends, as we doe, but should purchasse the commodities that
we want for halfe the treasure that now we do’. Here was the hard core
of the English thesis, as it was developed in the last quarter of the sixteenth
century. The Hakluyts were to a large extent responsible for giving such
views publicity. But it would be wrong to imagine that they represented
nobody but themselves. They had behind them a large number of in-
fluential statesmen, seamen, financiers and economists, and the movement
overseas, half-way between piracy and settlement, absorbed so large a
portion of the fluid capital of the period that it certainly retarded and
possibly altered domestic agricultural and manufacturing changes. Even
the inhospitable lands of Newfoundland were worked into the theme,
with a heavy emphasis on fishing as a nursery for seamen, on salt as a
commodity which could be manufactured instead of being bought, on
the masts and spars which might be got from the forests, and on the low
cost of the goods which would need to be taken out from England.

Equally clear were the objectives of the French or of the Dutch, and
equally clear the need to defy or evade the Spanish government if anything
was to be accomplished. French attempts, based largely on the interests
and enterprise of the fishing population of the Breton coast, were directed
more to the northern territories of the American continent than were
the English. They were attracted to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland,
and they were fishermen rather than explorers or settlers. As early as
1510 the cod fishery was methodically organised, with a central market
at Rouen. Yet the Norman Gonneville spent six months ashore in Brazil
in 1505, and after him a succession of French captains practised a mixture
of trade and piracy on the coasts of Brazil.

It was the Florentine Verezzano who firmly settled the French in their
peculiar approach to the problems of the New World, with his 1524
cruise along the coast of North America from North Carolina to

465

THE RENAISSANCE

Newfoundland. His last voyage was intended to discover some way round
the continental land-mass which he acclaimed. He did not succeed, but he
paved the way for Jacques Cartier and for the French expansion under
Francis I, when Pope Clement VII had so interpreted the famous bull of
Alexander VI as to cover only the territories already discovered by Spain
and Portugal, and so to leave France free to embark on discoveries
without risk of a papal embargo which Francis could ill afford. Cartier’s
voyages of 1534 and 1535 were therefore royal voyages, undertaken by the
orders, and on behalf, of the French king. He was to find some rumoured
islands and land where there was wealth of gold, and he was to find the
strait which would lead him to the land of Cathay. He explored New-
foundland and moved on to Labrador, landed in the Gaspe basin and
took possesion for the French, on his first voyage. On his second expe-
dition, in 1535, he proved that the St Lawrence was a river, not a strait,
and he travelled up it to Montreal and Quebec and spent the winter in
misery there. Such enterprise was followed by definite plans for settlement.
Cartier’s voyages had attracted no attention in Spain or Portugal, but the
plans which arose from his descriptions of the fertility of the soil in the
Lower St Lawrence basin led to the formulation of a concept of inter-
national law which should protect the French settlements from Spanish
claims. Here Francis laid down the doctrine that not discovery but
occupation and settlement gave title to overseas territories. Such a
formula had the consequence that lands which were settled were accepted
as rightly the property of Spain or of Portugal, and the Treaty of Crespy-
en-Lannois in 1545 forbade French intervention in the Spanish colonies
or in Brazil. French efforts, however, continued in Canada and in the
south; Fort Coligny was established near Rio de Janeiro in 1555, and
Jean Ribault started a series of French attempts to settle a French colony
in Florida in 1562.

The French emphasis on colonisation rather than on exploration and
trade was even more marked in Canada than in the south. But there it
was upset by the wealth of furs which, it soon became apparent, might
be got by trade with the Indians. Cartier’s voyages were followed by a
charter for colonisation, with Roberval as viceroy and lieutenant general,
instructed to convert the Indians to Christianity and to find a route to the
Indies, a mission which produced Cartier’s voyage of 1541-2, the settle-
ment of Charlebourg Royale, the emigration of several hundred men
and women, and obvious failure. Cartier’s Brief Ricit, however, kept the
attractions of Canada before the minds of Frenchmen, and when France’s
conquest of her internal troubles left her able to venture constructively into
the overseas territories once more, Canada occupied most of her attention.

By that time (the consolidation of power in the hands of Henry IV and
Sully marks the turning-point here as elsewhere) the diplomatic conventions
had been still further enlarged so as to permit of action by France or by

466

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

other Powers. For as early as the treaty of Cateau Cambresis it had been
agreed that ‘ West of the prime meridian and south of the Tropic of Cancer
. . .violence done by either party to the other side shall not be regarded
as in contravention of the treaties’. This concept of ‘No peace beyond the
line’, giving freedom to the adventurers to plunder, attack or settle,
without disturbing the peace of Europe, was again written into the Treaty
of Vervins of 1598. So Spain’s acknowledgment of Henry IV’s right to
the French throne carried with it an implicit acknowledgment of the
right to attempt settlement or trade overseas. France, moreover, was now
dominated in her trade policy by a coherent theory of economics, in
which the self-sufficiency of that great and wealthy country was the central
theme and the need to maintain the economic independence which such
natural wealth gave was the main purpose.

Though Newfoundland and Canada took so much of her attention,
the peculiar circumstances of France made for emphasis on the East
India trade as a source of desirable luxuries, and on the Levant route to
that trade as consonant with the history and practices of French trade
and diplomacy. A French East India Company was founded in 1602; a
renewed treaty with the Porte in 1604 gave promise of a reinvigoration
of the trade of Marseilles, and there was talk of some sort of canal to
link the Red Sea and the Mediterranean at this time. But the East Indies
trade on these lines did not flourish. New activity by the Algerian pirates,
and lack of French experience, made this route unable to compete with
the Cape route as the latter was being developed by Dutch and English
competitors with the Portuguese. The French desires for a flourishing
East India trade were not fulfilled until a new approach, borrowing
experience from the Dutch, was made under Colbert in the latter half of
the seventeenth century.

In this approach to the East Indian trade Sully reflected a very general
French attitude. But the more theoretical economists of the period, as
represented by Barthelemy de Laffemas, by the discussions in the Com-
mission of Commerce, and by Montchretien’s Traicte de Veconomie
politique, were not so preoccupied with a Levant-East Indian trade. For
them Canada and the north promised support for shipping, and fishing
both for cod and for herring. There a New France could be raised. There
the Indians could be Christianised. There French manufactures might be
sold and there the raw materials needed by France might be produced.
There, too, a sturdy race of Frenchmen might find homes. Into this
picture comes Samuel de Champlain, geographer royal, and his voyage
of 1603 up the St Lawrence, his second voyage of 1604 and the start of
French settlement in Acadia, the charter to de Monts and the Canada
Company of 1608, and Champlain’s foundation of Quebec in that year.
From that time onwards the French hold on the Lower St Lawrence was
precarious but durable.

467

THE RENAISSANCE

The Dutch, meanwhile, had reaped the advantages of the trade of the
New World without finding it necessary to participate actively in the
voyaging and trading either to the east or to the west. Much of their
energy was absorbed in their religious disputes and in the long struggle
with Spain; and they were able by virtue of their geographical position
and of their commercial acumen to make their country, and their great
city of Antwerp, the entrepot for the spices of the East and the bourse
for the treasures of America. The North Sea herring trade, too, brought
them into profitable commercial touch with Portugal and the Mediterranean,
and their Baltic trade in timbers, flax, tar and furs made them indispensable
to the other states of western Europe, in particular to England.

Their natural maritime outlet was to the north rather than to the west
or to the east, and their first attempts to find for themselves a place in
the contacts of Europe with overseas lands took the shape of attempts at
a north-east passage to India, not of rivalry in the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans. Even so, it is usually held that such attempts were not necessary
until Philip II joined Portugal to the Spanish Crown in 1580 and began
to close access to Iberian ports to Protestants and rebels. Until then the
Dutch had free and profitable access to the spices of the East, and much
of the wealth of Antwerp, and of the Baltic trade of the Dutch, depended
upon their spice trade with Lisbon. Their exploratory ventures took them
north and west, not south and east. The Dutch visited Nova Zembla in
1584, and in 1594 they sent an expedition of four ships to the Arctic. It
requires considerable special pleading to maintain that the Dutch navi-
gators and geographers knew the details of the Indian Ocean route to the
Spice Islands and sailed that route under Portuguese command (as they
sailed across the Atlantic to Brazil and the West Indies) before Philip
imposed his embargo, but that the reason why they changed their tactics
and began to fit out undisguised Dutch voyages in defiance of Spanish
authority after the embargo was that hitherto the navigation of the Indian
Ocean had been thought too difficult and dangerous. 1

In any case, it is universally accepted that the fitting out of an argosy
of four ships in 1594, to sail to Java and to return in 1597, marks an
outstanding change in the Dutch approach to the business of overseas
trade. The voyage was indeed the outcome of a long and careful collection
of evidence by the Dutch. It depended in particular on the knowledge
amassed by Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who had spent several years at
Goa in the service of the Portuguese archbishop there, and who on his
return to Europe published his Reysgeschrift and his Itinerario, giving a
geographical description of the world and including all the knowledge
which he possessed, both at first hand and from conversations with

1 This is the view put forward by B. H. M. Vlekke in Nusantara, A history of the East
Indian Archipelago, pp. 91-104. The more orthodox view is summarized in J. S. Fumivall,
Netherlands India, pp. 20-1.

468

EXPANSION AS A CONCERN OF ALL EUROPE

sailors and merchants, of the routes to India and America. In 1594, too,
Comelis de Houtman returned to Amsterdam after several years spent
in Lisbon. There he had acquired considerable knowledge of the Portuguese
East Indies trade, of its possibilities and of the difficulties into which the
Portuguese were running. There was already in Amsterdam a considerable
weight of knowledge, and maps of the closely guarded Portuguese routes
had already been printed and sold in Holland. (It is interesting to note
that this necessary feature of a wider approach to overseas trade and
navigation seems to have been concentrated in Holland from the start;
as late as the middle years of the seventeenth century French pilots were
navigating the St Lawrence with the help of charts printed in Holland.)
A Compagnie of Amsterdam merchants financed Houtman for a voyage
in 1594, and its safe and comparatively successful outcome stimulated a
succession of similar voyages, fourteen fleets from Holland making the
journey in the next five years.

Such voyages were, to varying degrees, the outcome of the enterprise
and enthusiasm of the civic corporations of Holland, not of strictly private
capital. They produced a new price-crisis in the European markets,
a new fury of speculation, a new and competitive, price-cutting, source
of spices, and a new desire for organisation, control and monopoly.
The outcome was the co-ordination of the local chambers into the
Dutch United East India Company, with a monopoly of the Dutch spice
trade and with a united capital of 6,424,588 florins, to which the Estates
General added a further 25,000 florins.

For the Indonesians the Dutch East Indies Company brought a new
regime, in which the Dutch showed themselves determined to claim
suzerainty as a means of excluding European rivals from the growing
areas, and determined to use that suzerainty to exact the production of
the spices which their closely organised control of the European market
led them to demand. For Europe as a whole the irruption of the Dutch
in this form into the East Indian trade marked a new epoch in that it
brought a newly purposeful trading approach to the commerce of the
overseas lands and in that, coinciding with the foundation of the English
East India Company in 1600, it brought to Europe a new rivalry, of the
Protestant and maritime nations, for the trade and navigation of the
New World.

469

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "The New Cambridge Modern History"

See other formats